m 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


1 1-1- 


DIVERSITY  of  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 
T  reuADV 


HUMAN  NATURE 
IN  POLITICS 


BY 

GRAHAM     WALLAS 


THIRD  EDITION 


NEW    YORK  ALFRED*  A -KNOPF  MCMXXI 


',    .''  < 


COPYRIGHT,  1921,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  Inc. 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


PREFACE  TO  THE  THIRD  EDITION  (1920) 

This  edition  is,  like  the  second  edition  (1910),  a  re- 
-j    print,  with  a  few  verbal  corrections,  of  the  first  edition 
(1908). 

I  tried  in  1908  to  make  two  main  points  clear.     My 

first  point  was  the  danger,  for  all  human  activities,  but 

A  especially  for  the  working  of  democracy,  of  the  "in- 

t  tellectualist"  assumption,  "that  every  human  action  is 

**  the  result  of  an  intellectual  process,  by  which  a  man 

■  •  first  thinks  of  some  end  which  he  desires,  and  then  cal- 

W  culates  the  means  by  which  that  end  can  be  attained"' 

^  (p.  21).     My  second  point  was  the  need  of  substituting 

i  for  that  assumption  a  conscious  and  systematic  effort 

£  of  thought.     "The  whole  progress,"  I  argued,  "of  hu- 

c/"1  man  civilization  beyond   its   earliest   stages,   has   been 

made  possible  by  the  invention  of  methods  of  thought 

which  enable  us  to  interpret  and  forecast  the  working  of 

nature  more  successfully  than  we  could,  if  we  merely 

followed  the  line  of  least  resistance  in  the  use  of  our 

minds"  (p.  114). 

In  1920  insistence  on  my  first  point  is  not  so  necessary 
as  it  was  in  1908.     The  assumption  that  men  are  auto- 

5 


6  HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

matically  guided  by  "enlightened  self-interest"  has  been 
discredited  by  the  facts  of  the  war  and  the  peace,  the 
success  of  an  anti-parliamentary  and  anti-intellectualist 
revolution  in  Russia,  the  British  election  of  1918,  the 
French  election  of  1919,  the  confusion  of  politics  in 
America,  the  breakdown  of  political  machinery  in 
Central  Europe,  and  the  general  unhappiness  which  has 
resulted  from  four  years  of  the  most  intense  and  heroic 
effort  that  the  human  race  has  ever  made.  One  only 
needs  to  compare  the  disillusioned  realism  of  our  present 
war  and  post-war  pictures  and  poems  with  the  nineteenth- 
century  war  pictures  at  Versailles  and  Berlin,  and  the 
war  poems  of  Campbell,  and  Berenger,  and  Tennyson, 
to  realize  how  far  we  now  are  from  exaggerating  human 
rationality. 

It  is  my  second  point,  which,  in  the  world  as  the  war 
has  left  it,  is  most  important.  There  is  no  longer  much 
danger  that  we  shall  assume  that  man  always  and  auto- 
matically thinks  of  ends  and  calculates  means.  The 
danger  is  that  we  may  be  too  tired  or  too  hopeless  to 
undertake  the  conscious  effort  by  which  alone  we  can 
think  of  ends  and  calculate  means. 

The  great  mechanical  inventions  of  the  nineteenth 
century  have  given  us  an  opportunity  of  choosing  for 
ourselves  our  way  of  living  such  as  men  have  never 


PREFACE 


.; 


had  before.     Up  to  our  own  time  the  vast  majority  of 
mankind   have  had   enough  to   do  to  keep  themselve^}^ 
-property  owners  or  a   few  organizers  of  other  men's  ^v>~ 
labours.      Even   when,   as  in   ancient  Egypt   or   Meso-  l* 
potamia,  nature  offered  whole  populations  three  hundred  1 
free  days  in  the  year  if  they  would  devote  two  months   S 
to  ploughing  and  harvest,  all  but  a  fraction  still  spent 
live,   and  to  satisfy  the  blind   instinct  whirrh-Umpels 
them  to  hand  on  life  to  another  generation.     An  effective  ^ 
choice  has  only  been  given  to  a  tiny  class  of  hereditary-^' 
'themselves  in  unwilling  toil,  building  tombs  or  palaces,  \o 
or  equipping  armies,  for  a  native  monarch  or  a  foreign 
conqueror.     The  monarch  could  choose  his  life,  but  his 
choice  was  poor  enough.     "There  is,"  says  Aristotle,  "a 
way  of  living  so  brutish   that   it   is  only  worth  notice 
because  many  of  those  who  can  live  any  life  they  like 
make  no  better  choice  than  did  Sardanapalus." 

The  Greek  thinkers  started  modern  civilization,  be- 
cause they  insisted  that  the  trading  populations  of  their 
walled  cities  should  force  themselves  to  think  out  an 
answer  to  the  question,  what  kind  of  life  is  good.  "The 
origin  of  the  city-state,"  says  Aristotle,  "is  that  it  enables 
us  to  live;  its  justification  is  that  it  enables  us  to  live 
well." 

Before  the  war,  there  were  in  London  and  New  York, 


8  HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

and  Berlin,  thousands  of  rich  men  and  women  as  free 
to  choose  their  way  of  life  as  was  Sardanapalus,  and  as 
dissatisfied  with  their  own  choice.  Many  of  the  sons  and 
daughters  of  the  owners  of  railways  and  coal  mines  and 
rubber  plantations  were  "fed  up"  with  motoring  or 
bridge,  or  even  with  the  hunting  and  fishing  which 
meant  a  frank  resumption  of  palaeolithic  life  without 
the  spur  of  palaeolithic  hunger.  But  my  own  work 
brought  me  into  contact  with  an  unprivileged  class, 
whose  degree  of  freedom  was  the  special  product  of 
modern  industrial  civilization,  and  on  whose  use  of  their 
freedom  the  future  of  civilization  may  depend.  A  clever 
young  mechanic,  at  the  age  when  the  Wanderjahre  of 
the  mediaeval  craftsman  used  to  begin,  would  come 
home  after  tending  a  "speeded  up"  machine  from  8 
A.  M.,  with  an  hour's  interval,  till  5  P.  M.  At  6  P.  M.  he 
had  finished  his  tea  in  the  crowded  living-room  of  his 
mother's  house,  and  was  "free"  to  do  what  he  liked. 
That  evening,  perhaps,  his  whole  being  tingled  with  half- 
conscious  desires  for  love  and  adventure  and  knowledge, 
and  achievement.  On  another  day  he  might  have  gone 
to  a  billiard  match  at  his  club  or  have  hung  round  the 
corner  for  a  girl  who  smiled  at  him  as  he  left  the  fac- 
tory, or  might  have  sat  on  his  bed  and  ground  at  a 
chapter  of  Marx  or  Hobson.     But  this  evening  he  saw 


P?iEFACE 


his  life  as  a  whole.     Tie  way  of  living  that  had  been  im- 
plied in  the  religious  lessons  at  school  seemed  strangely 
irrelevant;    but   still   he   felt   humble,    and   kind,    and 
anxious  for  guidance.     Should  he  aim  at  marriage,  and 
if  so  should  he  have  children  at  once  or  at  all?     If  he 
did  not  marry,  could  he  avoid  self-contempt  and  dis- 
ease?    Should  he  face  the  life  of  a  socialist  organizer, 
with  its  strain  and  uncertainty,  and  the  continual  pos- 
sibility of  disillusionment?    Should  he  fill  up  every  eve- 
ning with  technical  classes  and  postpone  his  ideals  until 
he  had   become  rich?     And   if  he   became   rich  what 
should  he  do  with  his  money?     Meanwhile,  there  was 
the  urgent  impulse  to  walk  and  think;  but  where  should 
he  walk  to,  and  with  whom? 

The  young  schoolmistress,  in  her  bed-sitting-room  a 
few  streets  off,  was  in  no  better  case.  She  and  a  friend 
sat  late  last  night,  agreeing  that  the  life  they  were  living 
was  no  real  life  at  all;  but  what  was  the  alternative? 
Had  the  "home  duties"  to  which  her  High  Church  sister 
devoted  herself  with  devastating  self-sacrifice  any  more 
meaning.  Ought  she,  with  her  eyes  open,  and  without 
much  hope  of  spontaneous  love,  to  enter  into  the  child- 
less "modern"  marriage  which  alone  seemed  possible 
for  her?  Ought  she  to  spend  herself  in  a  reckless 
campaign  for  the  suffrage?     Meanwhile,  she  had  had 


10        HUMAN   NATURE   \N   POLITICS 

her  tea,  her  eyes  were  too  tired  to  read,  and  what  on 
earth  should  she  do  till  bedtime? 

Such  moments  of  clear  self -questioning  were  of  course 
rare,  but  the  nerve-fretting  problems  always  existed. 
Industrial  civilization  had  given  the  growing  and  work- 
ing generation  a  certain  amount  of  leisure,  and  educa- 
tion enough  to  conceive  of  a  choice  in  the  use  of  that 
leisure;  but  had  offered  them  no  guidance  in  making 
their  choice. 

We  are  faced,  as  I  write,  with  the  hideous  danger  that 
fighting  may  blaze  up  again  throughout  the  whole 
Eurasian  continent,  and  that  the  young  men  and  girls 
of  Europe  may  have  no  more  choice  in  the  way  they 
spend  their  time  than  they  had  from  1914  to  1918  or 
the  serfs  of  Pharaoh  had  in  ancient  Egypt.  But  if  that 
immediate  danger  is  avoided,  I  dream  that  in  Europe 
and  in  America  a  conscious  and  systematic  discussion 
by  the  young  thinkers  of  our  time  of  the  conditions  of  a 
good  life  for  an  unprivileged  population  may  be  one  of 
the  results  of  the  new  vision  of  human  nature  and  human 
possibilities  which  modern  science  and  modern  industry 
have  forced  upon  us. 

Within  each  nation,  industrial  organization  may  cease 
to  be  a  confused  and  wasteful  struggle  of  interests,  if 
it  is  consciously  related  to  a  chosen  way  of  life  for  which 


PREFACE  11 


it  offers  to  every  worker  the  material  means.  Inter- 
national relations  may  cease  to  consist  of  a  constant 
plotting  of  evil  by  each  nation  for  its  neighbours,  if  ever 
the  youth  of  all  nations  know  that  French,  and  British, 
and  Germans,  and  Russians,  and  Chinese,  and  Ameri- 
cans, are  taking  a  conscious  part  in  the  great  adventure 
of  discovering  ways  of  living  open  to  all,  and  which  all 
can  believe  to  be  good. 

GRAHAM  WALLAS. 
August  1920. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface  5 

Synopsis  15 

Introduction  25 

PART  I 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  THE  PROBLEM 

CHAPTER 

I  Impulse  and  Instinct  in  Politics  45 

II  Political  Entities  81 
III     Non-Rational  Inference  in  Politics  118 

IV    The  Material  of  Political  Reasoning  133 

V    The  Method  of  Political  Reasoning  156 

PART  II 
POSSIBILITIES  OF  PROGRESS 

I     Political  Morality  185 

II  Representative  Government  215 

III  Official  Thought  225 
IV    Nationality  and  Humanity  282 


SYNOPSIS  OF  CONTENTS 

(Introduction  page  25) 

The  study  of  politics  is  now  in  an  unsatisfactory  position. 
Throughout  Europe  and  America,  representative  democracy  is 
generally  accepted  as  the  best  form  of  government;  but  those 
who  have  had  most  experience  of  its  actual  working  are  often 
disappointed  and  apprehensive.  Democracy  has  not  been  ex- 
tended to  non-European  races,  and  during  the  last  few  years 
many  democratic  movements  have  failed. 

This  dissatisfaction  has  led  to  much  study  of  political  in- 
stitutions; but  little  attention  has  been  recently  given  in  works 
on  politics  to  the  facts  of  human  nature.  Poltical  science  in 
the  past  was  mainly  based  on  conceptions  of  human  nature, 
but  the  discredit  of  the  dogmatic  political  writers  of  the  early 
nineteeth  century  has  made  modern  students  of  politics  over- 
anxious to  avoid  anything  which  recalls  their  methods.  That 
advance  therefore  of  psychology  which  has  transformed  ped- 
agogy and  criminology  has  left  politics  largely  unchanged. 

The  neglect  of  the  study  of  human  nature  is  likely,  however, 
to  prove  only  a  temporary  phase  of  political  thought,  and  there 
are  already  signs  that  it  is  coming  to  an  end. 

{PART  I. — Chapter  I. — Impulse  and  Instinct  in  Politics, 
page  45 

Any  examination  of  human  nature  in  politics  must  begin 
with  an  attempt  to  overcome  that  "intellectualism"  which  re- 

15 


16        HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

suits  both  from  the  traditions  of  political  science  and  from  tho 
mental  habits  of  ordinary  men. 

Political  impulses  are  not  mere  intellectual  inferences  from 
calculations  of  means  and  ends;  but  tendencies  prior  to, 
though  modified  by,  the  thought  and  experience  of  individual 
human  beings.  This  may  be  seen  if  we  watch  the  action  in 
politics  of  such  impulses  as  personal  affection,  fear,  ridicule, 
the  desire  of  property,  etc. 

t  All  our  impulses  and  instincts  are  greatly  increased  in  their 
immediate  effectiveness  if  they  are  "pure,"  and  in  their  more 
permanent  results  if  they  are  "first  hand"  and  are  connected 
with  the  earlier  stages  of  our  evolution.  In  modern  politics 
the  emotional  stimulus  which  reaches  us  through  the  news- 
papers is  generally  "pure,"  but  "second  hand,"  and  therefore 
is  both  facile  and  transient. 

The  frequent  repetition  of  an  emotion  or  impulse  is  often 
distressing.  Politicians,  like  advertisers,  must  allow  for  this 
fact,  which  again  is  connected  with  that  combination  of  the 
need  of  privacy  with  intolerance  of  solitude  to  which  we 
have  to  adjust  our  social  arrangements. 

Political  emotions  are  sometimes  pathologically  intensified 
when  experienced  simultaneously  by  large  numbers  of  human 
beings  in  physical  association,  but  the  conditions  of  political 
life  in  England  do  not  often  produce  this  phenomenon. 

The  future  of  international  politics  largely  depends  on  the 
question  whether  we  have  a  specific  instinct  of  hatred  for 
human  beings  of  a  different  racial  type  from  ourselves.  The 
point  is  not  yet  settled,  but  many  facts  which  are  often  ex- 
plained as  the  result  of  such  an  instinct  seem  to  be  due  to 
other  and  more  general  instincts  modified  by  association. 


fl 


SYNOPSIS    OF    CONTENTS  17 

(Chapter  II. — Political  Entities,  page  81) 

Political  acts  and  impulses  are  the  result  of  the  contact 
between  human  nature  and  its  environment.  During  the  period 
studied  by  the  politician,  human  nature  has  changed  very  little, 
but  political  environment  has  changed  with  ever-increasing 
rapidity. 

Those  facts  of  our  environment  which  stimulate  impulse 
and  action  reach  us  through  our  senses,  and  are  selected  from 
the  mass  of  our  sensations  and  memories  by  our  instinctive  or 
acquired  knowledge  of  their  significance.  In  politics  the  things 
recognized  are,  for  the  most  part,  made  by  man  himself,  and  our 
knowledge  of  their  significance  is  not  instinctive  but  acquired. 

Recognition  tends  to  attach  itself  to  symbols,  which  take  the 
place  of  more  complex  sensations  and  memories.  Some  of  the 
most  difficult  problems  in  politics  result  from  the  relation  be- 
tween the  conscious  use  in  reasoning  of  the  symbols  called 
words,  and  their  more  or  less  automatic  and  unconscious  ef- 
fect in  stimulating  emotion  and  action.  A.  political  symbol 
whose  significance  has  once  been  established  by  association, 
may  go  through  a  psychological  development  of  its  own,  apart 
from  the  history  of  the  facts  which  were  originally  symbolized 
by  it.  This  may  be  seen  in  the  case  of  the  names  and  emblems 
of  nations  and  parties;  and  still  more  clear Iv  in  the  history 
of  those  commercial  entities — "teas"  or  "soaps" — which  may 
be  already  made  current  by  advertisement  before  any  objects  to 
be  symbolized  by  them  have  been  made  or  chosen.  Ethical 
difficulties  are  often  created  by  the  relation  between  the  quickly 
changing  opinions  of  any  individual  politician  and  such  slowly 
changing  entities  as  his  reputation,  his  party  name,  or  the 
traditional  personality  of  a  newspaper  which  he  may  control. 


13         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


(Chapter  III. — Non-Rational  Inference  in  Politics,  page  118) 
Intellectualist  political  thinkers  often  assume,  not  only  that 
political  action  is  necessarily  the  result  of  inferences  as  to 
means  and  ends,  but  that  all  inferences  are  of  the  fame 
"rational"  type. 

It  is  difficult  to  distinguish  sharply  between  rational  and  non- 
rational  inferences  in  the  stream  of  mental  experience,  but 
it  is  clear  that  many  of  the  half-conscious  processes  by  which 
men  form  their  political  opinions  are  non-rational.  We  can 
'  generally  trust  non-rational  inferences  in  ordinary  life,  because 
they  do  not  give  rise  to  conscious  opinions  until  they  have  been 
strengthened  by  a  large  number  of  undesigned  coincidences. 
But  conjurers  and  others  who  study  our  non-rational  mental 
processes  can  so  play  upon  them  as  to  make  us  form  absurd 
beliefs.  The  empirical  art  of  politics  consists  largely  in  the 
creation  of  opinion  by  the  deliberate  exploitation  of  subcon- 
scious non-rational  inference.  The  process  of  inference  may 
go  on  beyond  the  point  desired  by  the  politician  who  started  it, 
and  is  as  likely  to  take  place  in  the  mind  of  a  passive  news- 
paper-reader as  among  the  members  of  the  most  excited 
crowd. 

{Chapter  IV. — The  Material  of  Political  Reasoning,  page  133) 

But  men  can  and  do  reason,  though  reasoning  is  only  one  of 
5^  their  mental  processes.  The  rules  for  valid  reasoning  laid 
down  by  the  Greeks  were  intended  primarily  for  use  in  pol- 
itics, but  in  politics  reasoning  has  in  fact  proved  to  be  more 
*  difficult  and  less  successful  than  in  the  physical  sciences.  The 
chief  cause  of  this  is  to  be  found  in  the  character  of  its  ma- 
terial. We  have  to  select  or  create  entities  to  reason  about, 
just  as  we  select  or  create  entities  to  stimulate  our  impulses 


SYNOPSIS    OF    CONTENTS  19 


and  non-rational  inferences.  In  the  physical  sciences  these 
selected  entities  are  of  two  types,  either  concrete  things  made 
exactly  alike,  or  abstract  qualities  in  respect  of  which  things 
otherwise  unlike  can  be  exactly  compared.  In  politics,  entities 
of  the  first  type  cannot  be  created,  and  political  philosophers 
have  constantly  sought  for  some  simple  entity  of  the  second 
type,  some  fact  or  quality,  which  may  serve  as  an  exact  "stand-  a 
ard"  for  political  calculation.  This  search  has  hitherto  been 
unsuccessful,  and  the  analogy  of  the  biological  sciences  sug- 
gests that  politicians  are  most  likely  to  acquire  the  power 
of  valid  reasoning  when  they,  like  doctors,  avoid  the  over- 
simplification of  their  material  and  aim  at  using  in  their 
reasoning  as  many  facts  as  possible  about  the  human  type, 
its  individual  variations,  and  its  environment.  Biologists  have 
shown  that  large  numbers  of  facts  as  to  individual  variations  , 
within  any  type  can  be  remembered  if  they  are  arranged  as 
continuous  curves  rather  than  as  uniform  rules  or  arbitrary  ex- 
ceptions. On  the  other  hand,  any  attempt  to  arrange  the  facts 
of  environment  with  the  same  approach  to  continuity  as  is  pos- 
sible with  the  facts  of  human  nature  is  likely  to  result  in 
error;  the  study  of  history  cannot  be  assimilated  to  that  of  <• 
biology. 

{Chapter  V.—The  Method  of  Political  Reasoning,  page  156) 

The  method  of  political  reasoning  has  shared  the  traditional 
over-simplification  of  its  subject-matter. 

In  Economics,  where  both  method  and  subject-matter  were 
originally  still  more  completely  simplified,  "quantitative" 
methods  have  since  levons's  time  tended  to  take  the  place  of 
"nualitative."  How  far  is  a  similar  change  possible  in  poli- 
tics? 


^r~- 


>s 


20        HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

Some  political  questions  can  obviously  be  argued  quantita- 
tively. Others  are  less  obviously  quantitative.  But  even  on 
the  most  complex  political  issues  experienced  and  responsible 
statesmen  do  in  fact  think  quantitatively,  although  the  methods 
by  which  they  reach  their  results  are  often  unconscious. 

When,  however,  politicians  start  with  intellectualist  as- 
sumptions, though  some  half-consciously  acquire  quantitative 
habits  of  thought,  many  desert  politics  altogether  from  dis- 
illusionment and  disgust.  What  is  wanted  in  the  training  of 
a  statesman  is  the  fully  conscious  formulation  and  acceptance 
of  methods  which  will  not  have  to  be  unlearned. 

Such  a  conscious  change  is  already  taking  place  in  the  work 
of  Royal  Commissions,  International  Congresses,  and  other 
bodies  and  persons  who  have  to  arrange  and  draw  conclusions 
from  large  masses  of  specially  collected  evidence.  Their 
methods  and  vocabulary,  even  when  not  numerical,  are  now- 
adays in  large  part  quantitative. 

In  parliamentary  oratory,  however,  the  old  tradition  of  over- 
simplification  is  apt  to  persist. 


Aj>i 


PART  II. — Chapter  I. — Political  Morality,  page  185) 

But  in  what  ways  can  such  changes  in  political  science 
affect  the  actual  trend  of  political  forces? 

In  the  first  place,  the  abandonment  by  political  thinkers  and 
writers  of  the  intellectualist  conception  of  politics  will  sooner 
or  later  influence  the  moral  judgments  of  the  working  poli- 
tician. A  young  candidate  will  begin  with  a  new  conception 
of  his  moral  relation  to  those  whose  will  and  opinions  he  is 
attempting  to  influence.  He  will  start,  in  that  respect,  from  a 
position  hitherto  confined  to  statesmen  who  have  been  made 
cynical  by  experience. 


SYNOPSIS   OF   CONTENTS  21 

If  that  were  the  only  result  of  our  new  knowledge,  political 
morality  might  be  changed  for  the  worse.  But  the  change  will 
go  deeper.  When  men  become  conscious  of  psychological  )(y 
processes  of  which  they  have  been  unconscious  or  half-con- 
scious, not  only  are  they  put  on  their  guard  against  the  ex- 
ploitation of  those  processes  in  themselves  by  others,  but  they 
become  better  able  to  control  them  from  within.  ^ 

If,  however,  a  conscious  moral  purpose  is  to  be  strong 
enough  to  overcome,  as  a  political  force,  the  advancing  art  of 
political  exploitation,  the  conception  of  control  from  within 
must  be  formed  into  an  ideal  entity  which,  like  "Science,"  can 
appeal  to  popular  imagination,  and  be  spread  by  an  organized 
system  of  education.  The  difficulties  in  this  are  great  (owing 
in  part  to  our  ignorance  of  the  varied  reactions  of  self-con- 
sciousness on  instinct),  but  a  wide  extension  of  the  idea  of 
causation  is  not  inconsistent  with  an  increased  intensity  of  moral 
passion. 

{Chapter  II. — Representative  Government,  page  215) 

The  changes  now  going  on  in  our  conception  of  the  psycho- 
logical basis  of  politics  will  also  re-open  the  discussion  of 
representative  democracy. 

Some  of  the  old  arguments  in  that  discussion  will  no  longer 
be  accepted  as  valid,  -^nd  it  is  probable  that  many  political 
thinkers  (especially  among  those  who  have  been  educated  in 
the  natural  sciences)  will  return  to  Plato's  proposal  of  a  des- 
potic government  carried  on  by  a  selected  and  trained  class, 
who  live  apart  from  the  "ostensible  world";  though  English  ex- 
perience in  India  indicates  that  even  the  most  carefully  selected 
official  must  still  live  in  the  "ostensible  world,"  and  that  the 
argument  that  good  government  requires  the  consent  of  the 


22         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


governed  does  not  depend  for  its  validity  upon  its  original 
intellectualist  associations. 

Our  new  way  of  thinking  about  politics  will,  however, 
certainly  change  the  form,  not  only  of  the  argument  for  con- 
sent, but  also  of  the  institutions  by  which  consent  is  expressed. 
An  election  (like  a  jury -trial)  will  be,  and  is  already  begin- 
ning to  be,  looked  upon  rather  as  a  process  by  which  right 
decisions  are  formed  under  right  conditions,  than  as  a  me- 
chanical expedient  by  which  decisions  already  formed  are  as- 
certained. 

Proposals  for  electoral  reform  which  seem  to  continue  the 
old  intellectualist  tradition  are  still  brought  forward,  and  new 
difficulties  in  the  working  of  representative  government  will 
arise  from  the  wider  extension  of  political  power.  But  that 
conception  of  representation  may  spread  which  desires  both  to 
increase  the  knowledge  and  public  spirit  of  the  voter  and  to 
provide  that  no  strain  is  put  upon  him  greater  than  he  can  bear. 

(Chapter  III.— Official  Thought,  page  255; 

A  quantitative  examination  of  the  political  force  created  by 
popular  election  shows  the  importance  of  the  work  of  non- 
elected  officials  in  any  effective  scheme  of  democracy. 

What  should  be  the  relation  between  these  officials  and  the 
elected  representatives?  On  this  point  English  opinion  already 
shows  a  marked  reaction  from  the  intellectualist  conception  of 
representative  government.  We  accept  the  fact  that  most  state 
officials  are  appointed  by  a  system  uncontrolled  either  by  indi- 
vidual members  of  parliament  or  by  parliament  as  a  whole, 
that  they  hold  office  during  good  behaviour,  and  that  they  are 
our  main  source  of  information  as  to  some  of  the  most  diffi- 
cult  points   on   which   we   form   political   judgments.     It   is 


\ 


SYNOPSIS    OF    CONTENTS  23 

largely  an  accident  that  the  same  system  has  not  been  intro- 
duced into  our  local  government. 

But  such  a  half-conscious  acceptance  of  a  partially  inde- 
pendent Civil  Service  as  an  existing  fact  is  not  enough.  We 
must  set  ourselves  to  realize  clearly  what  we  intend  our  officials 
to  do,  and  to  consider  how  far  our  present  modes  of  appoint- 
ment, and  especially  our  present  methods  of  organizing  of- 
ficial work,  provide  the  most  effective  means  for  carrying  out 
that  intention. 

(Chapter  IV. — Nationality  and  Humanity,  page  282^ 

\\  ha!  influence  will  the  new  tendencies  in  political  thought 
have  on  the  emotional  and  intellectual  conditions  of  political 
solidarity  ? 

In  the  old  city-states,  where  the  area  of  government  corre- 
al,. , nde  1  to  die  actual  ran-.-  of  human  vision  and  memory,  a 
kind  of  local  emotion  could  be  developed  which  is  now  im- 
possible  in  a  "delocalized"  population.  The  solidarity  of  a  ^ 
modern  state  must  therefore  depend  on  facts  not  of  observa- 
tion but  of  imagination. 

The  makers  of  the  existing  European  national  states,  Mazzini 
and  Bismarck,  held  that  the  possible  extent  of  a  state  depended 
on  national  homogeneity,  i.e.  on  the  possibility  that  every  in- 
dividual member  of  a  state  should  believe  that  all  the  others 
were  tike  himself.  Bismarck  thought  that  the  degree  of  actual 
homogeneity  which  was  a  necessary  basis  for  this  belief  could 
be  made  by  "blood  and  iron":  Mazzini  thought  that  mankind 
was  already  divided  into  homogeneous  groups,  whose  limits 
should  be  followed  in  the  reconstruction  of  Europe.  Both  were  £ 
convinced  that  the  emotion  of  political  solidarity  was  impossi- 
ble between  individuals  of  consciously  different  national  types. 

During  the  last  quarter  of  a  century  this  conception  of  the 


24         HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 

world  as  composed  of  a  mosaic  of  homogeneous  nations  has 
been  made  more  difficult  (a)  by  the  continued  existence  and 
even  growth  of  separate  national  feelings  within  modern  states, 
and  (b)  by  the  fact  that  the  European  and  non-European  races 
have  entered  into  closer  political  relationships.  The  attempt, 
therefore,  to  transfer  the  traditions  of  national  homogeneity 
and  solidarity  either  to  the  inhabitants  of  a  modern  world- 
empire  as  a  whole,  or  to  the  members  of  the  dominant  race  in 
it,  disguises  the  real    facts  and  adds  to  the  danger  of  war. 

Can  we,  however,  acquire  a  political  emotion  based,  not  upon 
a  belief  in  the  likeness  of  individual  human  beings,  but  upon  the 
recognition  of  their  unlikeness?  Darwin's  proof  of  the  re- 
lation between  individual  and  racial  variation  might  have  pro- 
duced such  an  emotion,  if  it  had  not  been  accompanied  by 
the  conception  of  the  "struggle  for  life"  as  a  moral  duty.  As 
it  is,  interracial  and  even  interimperial  wars  can  be  represented 
as  necessary  stages  in  the  progress  of  the  species.  But  present- 
day  biologists  tell  us  that  the  improvement  of  any  one  race 
will  come  most  effectively  from  the  conscious  co-operation, 
and  not  from  the  blind  conflict  of  individuals;  and  it  may  be 
found  that  the  improvement  of  the  whole  species  will  also 
come  rather  from  a  conscious  world-purpose  based  upon  a  rec- 
£  ognition  of  the  value  of  racial  as  well  as  individual  variety, 
than  from  mere  fighting. 


INTRODUCTION 

Tin;  study  of  politics  is  just  now  (1908)  in  a  curiously 
unsatisfactory  position. 

At  first  sight  the  main  controversy  as  to  the  best  form 
of  government  appears  to  have  been  finally  settled  in 
favour  of  representative  democracy.  Forty  years  ago 
it  could  still  be  argued  that  to  base  the  sovereignty  of  a 
great  modern  nation  upon  a  widely  extended  popular 
vote  was,  in  Europe  at  least,  an  experiment  which  had 
never  been  successfully  tried.  England,  indeed,  by  the 
"leap  in  the  dark"  of  1867,  became  for  the  moment  the 
only  large  European  State  whose  government  was  demo- 
cratic and  representative.  But  to-day  a  parliamentary 
republic  based  upon  universal  suffrage  exists  in  France 
without  serious  opposition  or  protest.  Italy  enjoys  an 
apparently  stable  constitutional  monarchy.  Universal 
suffrage  has  just  been  enacted  in  Austria.  Even  the 
German  Emperor  for  an  instant  after  the  election  of 
1907  spoke  of  himself  rather  as  the  successful  leader  of 
a  popular  electoral  campaign  than  as  the  inheritor  of  a 
divine  right.  The  vast  majority  of  the  Russian  nation 
passionately  desires  a  sovereign  parliament,  and  a  reac- 
tionary Duma  finds  itself  steadily  pushed  by  circum- 
stances towards  that  position.     The  most  ultramontane 

Roman  Catholics  demand  temporal  power  for  the  Pope, 

25 


26         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

no  longer  as  an  ideal  system  of  world  government,  but  as 
an  expedient  for  securing  in  a  few  square  miles  of  Ital- 
ian territory  liberty  of  action  for  the  directors  of  a 
church  almost  all  of  whose  members  will  remain  voting 
citizens  of  constitutional  States.  None  of  the  proposals 
for  a  non-representative  democracy  which  were  asso- 
ciated with  the  communist  and  anarchist  movements  of 
the  nineteenth  century  have  been  at  all  widely  accepted, 
or  have  presented  themselves  as  a  definite  constructive 
scheme;  and  almost  all  those  who  now  hope  for  a  social 
change  by  which  the  results  of  modern  scientific  industry 
shall  be  more  evenly  distributed  put  their  trust  in  the 
electoral  activity  of  the  working  classes. 

And  yet,  in  the  very  nations  which  have  most  whole- 
heartedly accepted  representative  democracy,  politicians 
and  political  students  seem  puzzled  and  disappointed 
by  their  experience  of  it.  The  United  States  of  America 
have  made  in  this  respect  by  far  the  longest  and  most 
continuous  experiment.  Their  constitution  has  lasted 
for  a  century  and  a  quarter,  and,  in  spite  of  controversy 
and  even  war  arising  from  opposing  interpretations  of  its 
details,  its  principles  have  been,  and  still  are,  practically 
unchallenged.  But  as  far  as  an  English  visitor  can 
judge,  no  American  thinks  with  satisfaction  of  the  elec- 
toral "machine,"  whose  power  alike  in  Federal,  State, 
and  Municipal  politics  is  still  increasing. 

In  England  not  only  has  our  experience  of  representa- 
tive democracy  been  much  shorter  than  that  of  America, 
but  our  political  traditions  have  tended  to  delay  the  full 


INTRODUCTION  27 

■ 

acceptance  of  the  democratic  idea  even  in  the  working 
of  democratic  institutions.  Yet,  allowing  for  differences 
of  degree  and  circumstance,  one  finds  in  England  among 
the  most  loyal  democrats,  if  they  have  been  brought  into 
close  contact  with  the  details  of  electoral  organization, 
something  of  the  same  disappointment  which  has  become 
more  articulate  in  America.  I  have  helped  to  fight  a 
good  many  parliamentary  contests,  and  have  myself 
been  a  candidate  in  a  series  of  five  London  municipal 
elections.  In  my  last  election  I  noticed  that  two  of  my 
canvassers,  when  talking  over  the  day's  work,  used  in- 
dependently the  phrase,  "It  is  a  queer  business."  I 
have  heard  much  the  same  words  used  in  England  by 
those  professional  political  agents  whose  efficiency  de- 
pends on  their  seeing  electoral  facts  without  illusion. 
I  have  no  first-hand  knowledge  of  German  or  Italian 
electioneering,  but  when  a  year  ago  I  talked  with  my 
hosts  of  the  Paris  Municipal  Council,  I  seemed  to  detect 
in  some  of  them  indications  of  good-humoured  disillu- 
sionment with  regard  to  the  working  of  a  democratic 
electoral  system. 

In  England  and  America  one  has,  further,  the  feeling 
that  it  is  the  growing,  and  not  the  decaying,  forces  of 
society  which  create  the  most  disquieting  problems.  In 
America  the  "machine"  takes  its  worst  form  in  those 
great  new  cities  whose  population  and  wealth  and  energy 
represent  the  goal  towards  which  the  rest  of  American 
civilization  is  apparently  tending.  In  England,  to  any 
one  who  looks  forward,  the  rampant  bribery  of  the  old 


28         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


fishing-ports,  or  the  traditional  and  respectable  corrup- 
tion of  the  cathedral  cities,  seem  comparatively  small 
and  manageable  evils.  The  more  serious  grounds  for 
apprehension  come  from  the  newest  inventions  of  wealth 
and  enterprise,  the  up-to-date  newspapers,  the  power 
and  skill  of  the  men  who  direct  huge  aggregations  of  in- 
dustrial capital,  the  organised  political  passions  of  work- 
ing men  who  have  passed  through  the  standards  of  the 
elementary  schools,  and  who  live  in  hundreds  of  square 
miles  of  new,  healthy,  indistinguishable  suburban  streets. 
Every  few  years  some  invention  in  political  method  is 
made,  and  if  it  succeeds  both  parties  adopt  it.  In  poli- 
tics, as  in  football,  the  tactics  which  prevail  are  not  those 
which  the  makers  of  the  rules  intended,  but  those 
by  which  the  players  find  that  they  can  win;  and  men 
feel  vaguely  that  the  expedients  by  which  their  party  is 
most  likely  to  win  may  turn  out  not  to  be  those  by  which 
a  State  is  best  governed. 

More  significant  still  is  the  fear,  often  expressed  as 
new  questions  force  themselves  into  politics,  that  the 
existing  electoral  system  will  not  bear  the  strain  of  an 
intensified  social  conflict.  Many  of  the  arguments  used 
in  the  discussion  of  the  tariff  question  in  England,  or  of 
the  concentration  of  capital  in  America,  or  of  social- 
democracy  in  Germany,  imply  this.  Popular  election, 
it  is  said,  may  work  fairly  well  as  long  as  those  questions 
are  not  raised  which  cause  the  holders  of  wealth  and  in- 
dustrial power  to  make  full  use  of  their  opportunities. 
But  if  the  rich  people  in  any  modern  state  thought  it 


INTRODUCTION  29 

■ 

worth  their  while,  in  order  to  secure  a  tariff,  or  legalise  a 
trust,  or  oppose  a  confiscatory  tax,  to  subscribe  a  third  of 
their  income  to  a  political  fund,  no  Corrupt  Practices  Act 
yet  invented  would  prevent  them  from  spending  it.  If 
they  did  so,  there  is  so  much  skill  to  be  bought,  and  the 
art  of  using  skill  for  the  production  of  emotion  and 
opinion  has  so  advanced,  that  the  whole  condition  of 
political  contests  would  be  changed  for  the  future.  No 
existing  party,  unless  it  enormously  increased  its  own 
fund,  or  discovered  some  new  source  of  political 
strength,  would  have  any  chance  of  permanent  success. 

The  appeal,  however,  in  the  name  of  electoral  purity, 
to  protectionists,  tru-t-promoters,  and  socialists,  that  they 
should  drop  their  various  movements  and  so  confine 
politics  to  less  exciting  questions,  falls,  naturally  enough, 
on  deaf  ears. 

The  proposal,  again,  to  extend  the  franchise  to  women 
is  met  by  that  sort  of  hesitation  and  evasion  which  is 
characteristic  of  politicians  who  are  not  sure  of  their  in- 
tellectual ground.  A  candidate  who  has  just  been 
speaking  on  the  principles  of  democracy  finds  it,  when 
he  is  heckled,  very  difficult  to  frame  an  answer  which 
would  justify  the  continued  exclusion  of  women  from  the 
franchise.  Accordingly  a  large  majority  of  the  success- 
ful candidates  from  both  the  main  parties  at  the  general 
election  of  1906  pledged  themselves  to  support  female 
suffrage.  But,  as  I  write,  many,  perhaps  the  majority, 
of  those  who  gave  that  pledge  seem  to  be  trying  to  avoid 
the  necessity  of  carrying  it  out.     There  is  no  reason  to 


30         HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 


suppose  that  they  are  men  of  exceptionally  dishonest 
character,  and  their  fear  of  the  possible  effect  of  a  final 
decision  is  apparently  genuine.  They  are  aware  that 
certain  differences  exist  between  men  and  women,  though 
they  do  not  know  what  those  differences  are,  nor  in  what 
way  they  are  relevant  to  the  question  of  the  franchise. 
But  they  are  even  less  steadfast  in  their  doubts  than  in 
their  pledges,  and  the  question  will,  in  the  comparatively 
near  future,  probably  be  settled  by  importunity  on  the 
one  side  and  mere  drifting  on  the  other. 

This  half  conscious  feeling  of  unsettlement  on  matters 
which  in  our  explicit  political  arguments  we  treat  as 
settled,  is  increased  by  the  growing  urgency  of  the  prob- 
lem of  race.  The  fight  for  democracy  in  Europe  and 
America  during  the  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth 
centuries  was  carried  on  by  men  who  were  thinking  only 
of  the  European  races.  But,  during  the  extension  of 
democracy  after  1870,  almost  all  the  Great  Powers  were 
engaged  in  acquiring  tropical  dependencies,  and  im- 
provements in  the  means  of  communication  were  bringing 
all  the  races  of  the  world  into  close  contact.  The  ordi- 
nary man  now  finds  that  the  sovereign  vote  has  (with  ex- 
ceptions numerically  insignificant)  been  in  fact  confined 
to  nations  of  European  origin.  But  there  is  nothing  in 
the  form  or  history  of  the  representative  principle  which 
seems  to  justify  this,  or  to  suggest  any  alternative  for  the 
vote  as  a  basis  of  government.  Nor  can  he  draw  any  in- 
telligible and  consistent  conclusion  from  the  practice 
of  democratic  States  in  giving  or  refusing  the  vote  to 


INTRODUCTION  31 

their  non-European  subjects.  The  United  States,  for 
instance,  have  silently  and  almost  unanimously  dropped 
the  experiment  of  negro  suffrage.  In  that  case,  owing 
to  the  wide  intellectual  gulf  between  the  West  African 
negro  and  the  white  man  from  North-West  Europe,  the 
problem  was  comparatively  simple;  but  no  serious  at- 
tempt has  yet  been  made  at  a  new  solution  of  it,  and 
the  Americans  have  been  obviously  puzzled  in  dealing 
with  the  more  subtle  racial  questions  created  by  the 
immigration  of  Chinese  and  Japanese  and  Slavs,  or  by 
the  government  of  the  mixed  populations  in  the  Philip- 
pines. 

England  and  her  colonies  show  a  like  uncertainty  in 
the  presence  of  the  political  questions  raised  both  by  the 
migration  of  non-white  races  and  by  the  acquisition  of 
tropical  dependencies.  Even  when  we  discuss  the  politi- 
cal future  of  independent  Asiatic  States  we  are  not  clear 
whether  the  principle,  for  instance,  of  "no  taxation 
without  representation"  should  be  treated  as  applicable 
to  them.  Our  own  position  as  an  Asiatic  power  depends 
very  largely  on  the  development  of  China  and  Persia, 
which  are  inhabited  by  races  who  may  claim,  in  some  re- 
spects, to  be  our  intellectual  superiors.  When  they 
adopt  our  systems  of  engineering,  mechanics,  arma- 
ment we  have  no  doubt  that  they  are  doing  a  good  thing 
for  themselves,  even  though  we  may  fear  their  commer- 
cial or  military  rivalry.  But  no  follower  of  Bentham  is 
now  eager  to  export  for  general  Asiatic  use  our  latest  in- 
ventions in  political  machinery.     We  hear  that  the  Per- 


32         HUMAN  NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

j  i 

sians  have  established  a  parliament,  and  watch  the  de- 
velopment of  their  experiment  with  a  complete  suspen- 
sion of  judgment  as  to  its  probable  result.  We  have 
helped  the  Japanese  to  preserve  their  independence  as  a 
constitutional  nation,  and  most  Englishmen  vaguely  sym- 
pathize with  the  desire  of  the  Chinese  progressives  both 
for  national  independence  and  internal  reform.  Few  of 
us,  however,  would  be  willing  to  give  any  definite  ad- 
vice to  an  individual  Chinaman  who  asked  whether  he 
ought  to  throw  himself  into  a  movement  for  a  repre- 
sentative parliament  on  European  lines. 

Within  our  own  Empire  this  uncertainty  as  to  the  limi- 
tations of  our  political  principles  may  at  any  moment 
produce  actual  disaster.  In  Africa,  for  instance,  the 
political  relationship  between  the  European  inhabitants 
of  our  territories  and  the  non-European  majority  of  Kaf- 
firs, Negroes,  Hindoos,  Copts,  or  Arabs  is  regulated  on 
entirely  different  lines  in  Natal,  Basutoland,  Egypt,  or 
East  Africa.  In  each  case  the  constitutional  difference 
is  due  not  so  much  to  the  character  of  the  local  problem 
as  to  historical  accident,  and  trouble  may  break  out  any- 
where and  at  any  time,  either  from  the  aggression  of  the 
Europeans  upon  the  rights  reserved  by  the  Home  Gov- 
ernment to  the  non-Europeans,  or  from  a  revolt  of  the 
non-Europeans  themselves.  Blacks  and  Whites  are 
equally  irritated  by  the  knowledge  that  there  is  one  law 
in  Nairobi  and  another  in  Durban. 

This  position  is,  of  course,  most  dangerous  in  the  case 
of  India.     For  two  or  three  generations  the  ordinary 


INTRODUCTION 


English  Liberal  postponed  any  decision  on  Indian  poli- 
tical problems  because  he  believed  that  we  were  educa- 
ting the  inhabitants  for  self-government,  and  that  in  due 
time  they  would  all  have  a  vote  for  an  Indian  parlia- 
ment. Now  he  is  becoming  aware  that  there  are  many 
races  in  India,  and  that  some  of  the  most  important  dif- 
ferences between  those  races  among  themselves,  and  be- 
tween any  of  them  and  ourselves,  are  not  such  as  can  be 
obliterated  by  education.  He  is  told  by  men  whom  he  re- 
spects that  this  fact  makes  it  certain  that  the  represen- 
tative system  which  is  suitable  for  England  will  never  be 
suitable  for  India,  and  therefore  he  remains  uneasily 
responsible  for  the  permanent  autocratic  government  of 
three  hundred  million  people,  remembering  from  time 
to  time  that  some  of  these  people  or  their  neighbours 
may  have  much  more  definite  political  ideas  than  his 
own,  and  that  he  ultimately  may  have  to  fight  for  a 
power  which  he  hardly  desires  to  retain. 

Meanwhile,  the  existence  of  the  Indian  problem  loos- 
ens half -consciously  his  grip  upon  democratic  principle 
in  matters  nearer  home.  Newspapers  and  magazines 
and  steamships  are  constantly  making  India  more  real 
to  him,  and  the  conviction  of  a  Liberal  that  Polish  immi- 
grants or  London  "latch-key"  lodgers  ought  to  have  a 
vote  is  less  decided  than  it  would  have  been  if  he  had 
not  acquiesced  in  the  decision  that  Rajputs,  and  Bengalis, 
and  Parsees  should  be  refused  it. 

Practical  politicians  cannot,  it  is  true,  be  expected  to 
stop  in  the  middle  of  a  campaign  merely  because  they 


34         HUMAN  NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

have  an  uncomfortable  feeling  that  the  rules  of  the  game 
require  re-stating  and  possibly  re-casting.  But  the  win- 
ning or  losing  of  elections  does  not  exhaust  the  whole 
political  duty  of  a  nation,  and  perhaps  there  never  has 
been  a  time  in  which  the  disinterested  examination  of 
political  principles  has  been  more  urgently  required. 
Hitherto  the  main  stimulus  to  political  speculation  has 
been  provided  by  wars  and  revolutions,  by  the  fight  of  the 
Greek  States  against  the  Persians,  and  their  disastrous 
struggle  for  supremacy  among  themselves,  or  by  the  wars 
of  religion  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries, 
and  the  American  and  French  revolutions  in  the  eight- 
eenth century.  The  outstanding  social  events  in  Europe 
in  our  own  time  have,  however,  been  so  far  the  failures 
rather  than  the  successes  of  great  movements;  the  ap- 
parent wasting  of  devotion  and  courage  in  Russia,  owing 
to  the  deep-seated  intellectual  divisions  among  the  re- 
formers and  the  military  advantage  which  modern  weap- 
ons and  means  of  communication  give  to  any  govern- 
ment however  tyrannous  and  corrupt;  the  baffling  of  the 
German  social-democrats  by  the  forces  of  religion  and 
patriotism  and  by  the  infertility  of  their  own  creed;  the 
weakness  of  the  successive  waves  of  American  democracy 
when  faced  by  the  political  power  of  capital. 

But  failure  and  bewilderment  may  present  as  stern 
a  demand  for  thought  as  the  most  successful  revolution, 
and,  in  many  respects,  that  demand  is  now  being  well 
answered.  Political  experience  is  recorded  and  exam- 
ined with  a  thoroughness  hitherto  unknown.     The  history 


INTRODUCTION  35 

< 

of  political  action  in  the  past,  instead  of  being  left  to 
isolated  scholars,  has  become  the  subject  of  organized 
and  minutely  subdivided  labour.  The  new  political 
developments  of  the  present,  Australian  Federation,  the 
Referendum  in  Switzerland,  German  Public  Finance,  the 
Party  system  in  England  and  America,  and  innumerable 
others,  are  constantly  recorded,  discussed  and  compared 
in  the  monographs  and  technical  magazines  which  cir- 
culate through  all  the  universities  of  the  globe. 

The  only  form  of  study  which  a  political  thinker  of 
one  or  two  hundred  years  ago  would  now  note  as  missing 
is  any  attempt  to  deal  with  politics  in  its  relation  to  the 
nature  of  man.  The  thinkers  of  the  past,  from  Plato  to 
Bentham  and  Mill,  had  each  his  own  view  of  human 
nature,  and  they  made  those  views  the  basis  of 
their  speculations  on  government.  But  no  modern  trea- 
tise on  political  science,  whether  dealing  with  institutions 
or  finance,  now  begins  with  anything  corresponding  to 
the  opening  words  of  Bentham's  "Principles  of  Morals 
and  Legislation" — "Nature  has  placed  mankind  under 
the  governance  of  two  sovereign  masters,  pain  and  pleas- 
ure"; or  to  the  "first  general  proposition"  of  Nassau 
Senior's  "Political  Economy,"  "Every  man  desires  to 
obtain  additional  wealth  with  as  little  sacrifice  as  pos- 
sible." In  most  cases  one  cannot  even  discover 
whether  the  writer  is  conscious  of  possessing  any  con- 
ception of  human  nature  at  all. 

1  Political  Economy  (in  the  Encyclopedia  Metro politana) ,  2nd  edition 
(1850),  p.  26. 


36         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


It  is  easy  to  understand  how  this  has  come  about. 
Political  science  is  just  beginning  to  regain  some  mea- 
sure of  authority  after  the  acknowledged  failure  of  its 
confident  professions  during  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  Bentham's  Utilitarianism,  after  super- 
seding both  Natural  Right  and  the  blind  tradition  of  the 
lawyers,  and  serving  as  the  basis  of  innumerable  legal 
and  constitutional  reforms  throughout  Europe,  was  killed 
by  the  unanswerable  refusal  of  the  plain  man  to  believe 
that  ideas  of  pleasure  and  pain  are  the  only  sources  of 
human  motive.  The  "classical"  political  economy  of 
the  universities  and  the  newspapers,  the  political  econ- 
omy of  MacCulloch  and  Senior  and  Archbishop 
Whately,  was  even  more  unfortunate  in  its  attempts  to 
deduce  a  whole  industrial  polity  from  a  "few  simple 
principles"  of  human  nature.  It  became  identified  with 
the  shallow  dogmatism  by  which  well-to-do  people  in  the 
first  half  of  Queen  Victoria's  reign  tried  to  convince 
working  men  that  any  change  in  the  distribution  of  the 
good  things  of  life  was  "scientifically  impossible."  Marx 
and  Ruskin  and  Carlyle  were  masters  of  sarcasm,  and  the 
process  is  not  yet  forgotten  by  which  they  slowly  com- 
pelled even  the  newspapers  to  abandon  the  "laws  of 
political  economy,"  which  from  1815  to  1870  stood,  like 
gigantic  stuffed  policemen,  on  guard  over  rent  and  prof- 
its. 

When  the  struggle  against  "Political  Economy"  was  at 
its  height,  Darwin's  "Origin  of  Species"  revealed  a  uni- 
verse in  which  the  "few  simlple  principles"  seemed  a 


INTRODUCTION  37 

little  absurd,  and  nothing  has  hitherto  taken  their  place. 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  indeed,  attempted  to  turn  a  single 
hasty  generalization  from  the  history  of  biological  evo- 
lution into  a  complete  social  philosophy.  He  preached 
what  he  called  "the  beneficent  working  of  the  survival 
of  the  fittest"  ("Man  versus  the  State"  p.  50),  and  Sir 
Henry  Maine  called  "beneficent  private  war,"  x  a  pro- 
cess which  they  conceived  of  as  no  more  dangerous  than 
that  degree  of  trade  competition  which  prevailed  among 
English  provincial  shopkeepers  about  the  year  1884. 
Mr.  Spencer  failed  to  secure  even  the  whole-hearted  sup- 
port of  the  newspapers;  but  in  so  far  as  his  system 
gained  currency  it  helped  further  to  discredit  any  at- 
tempt to  connect  political  science  with  the  study  of 
human  nature. 

For  the  moment,  therefore,  nearly  all  students  of  poli- 
tics analyse  institutions  and  avoid  the  analysis  of  man. 
The  study  of  human  nature  by  the  psychologists  has,  it 
is  true,  advanced  enormously  since  the  discovery  of 
human  evolution,  but  it  has  advanced  without  affecting 
or  being  affected  by  the  study  of  politics.  Modern 
text-books  of  psychology  are  illustrated  with  innum- 
erable facts  from  the  home,  the  school,  the  hospital,  and 
the  psychological  laboratory;  but  in  them  politics  are 
hardly  ever  mentioned.  The  professors  of  the  new 
science  of  sociology  are  beginning,  it  is  true,  to  deal  with 
human  nature  in  its  relation  not  only  to  the  family  and  to 

1  "The  beneficent  private  war  which  makes  one  man  strive  to  climb 
over  the  shoulders  of  another  man."  (Maine.  Popular  Government,  p. 
50).     See  D.  G.  Ritchie,  Darwinism  and  Politics,  p.  4. 


38         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

religion  and  industry,  but  also  to  certain  political 
institutions.  Sociology,  however,  has  had,  as  yet,  little 
influence  on  political  science. 

I  believe  myself  that  this  tendency  to  separate  the 
study  of  politics  from  that  of  human  nature  will  prove 
to  be  only  a  momentary  phase  of  thought;  that  while  it 
lasts  its  effects,  both  on  the  science  and  on  the  conduct  of 
politics,  are  likely  to  be  harmful;  and  that  there  are 
already  signs  that  it  is  coming  to  an  end. 

It  is  sometimes  pleaded  that,  if  thorough  work  is  to  be 
done,  there  must,  in  the  moral  as  in  the  physical  sciences, 
be  division  of  labour.  But  this  particular  division  can- 
not, in  fact,  be  kept  up.  The  student  of  politics  must, 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  £orm  a  conception  of 
human  nature,  and  the  less  conscious  he  is  of  his  concep- 
tion the  more  likely  he  is  to  be  dominated  by  it.  If  he 
has  had  wide  personal  experience  of  political  life  his  un- 
conscious assumptions  may  be  helpful;  if  he  has  not  they 
are  certain  to  be  misleading.  Mr.  Roosevelt's  little  book 
on  "American  Ideals"  is,  for  instance,  useful,  because 
when  he  thinks  about  mankind  in  politics,  he  thinks  about 
the  politicians  whom  he  has  known.  After  reading  it 
one  feels  that  many  of  the  more  systematic  books  on 
politics  by  American  university  professors  are  useless, 
just  because  the  writers  dealt  with  abstract  men,  formed 
on  assumptions.^,  which  they  were  unaware  and  which 
they  had  never  tested  either  by  experience  or  by  study. 
-  In  the  other  sciences  which. deal  with  human  actions, 
this  division  between  the  study  of  the  thioigj'dqne  and  the* 


INTRODUCTION  39 


study  of  the  being  who  does  it  is  not  found.  In  crim- 
inology Beccaria  and  Bentham  long  ago  showed  how 
dangerous  that  jurisprudence  was  which  separated  the 
classification  of  crimes  from  the  study  of  the  criminal. 
The  conceptions  of  human  nature  which  they  held  have 
been  superseded  by  evolutionary  psychology,  but  modern 
thinkers  like  Lombroso  have  brought  the  new  psychology 
into  the  service  of  a  new  and  fruitful  criminology. 

In  pedagogy  also,  Locke,  and  Rousseau,  and  Herbart, 
and  the  many-sided  Bentham,  based  their  theories  of 
education  upon  their  conceptions  of  human  nature. 
Those  conceptions  were  the  same  as  those  which  underlay 
their  political  theories,  and  have  been  affected  in  the 
same  way  by  modern  knowledge.  For  a  short  time  it 
even  looked  as  if  the  lecturers  in  the  English  training 
colleges  would  make  the  same  reparation  between  the 
Btudy  of  human  institutions  and  human  nature  as  has 
been  made  in  politics.  Lectures  on  School  Method  were 
distinguished  during  this  period  from  those  on  the  The- 
ory of  Education.  The  first  became  mere  descriptions 
and  comparisons  of  the  organization  and  teaching  in  the 
best  schools.  The  second  consisted  of  expositions,  with 
occasional  comment  and  criticism,  of  such  classical 
writers  as  Comenius,  or  Locke,  or  Rousseau,  and 
were  curiously  like  those  informal  talks  on  Aristotle, 
Hobbes,  Locke,  and  Rousseau,  which,  under  the  name 
of  the  Theory  of  Politics,  formed  in  my  time  such 
a  pleasant  interlude  in  the  Oxford  course  of  Humaner 


40         HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 

Letters.  But  while  the  Oxford  lecture-courses  still, 
I  believe,  survive  almost  unchanged,  the  training 
college  lectures  on  the  Theory  of  Education  are  begin- 
ning to  show  signs  of  a  change  as  great  as  that  which  took 
place  in  the  training  of  medical  students,  when  the  lec- 
turers on  anatomy,  instead  of  expounding  the  classical 
authorities,  began  to  give,  on  their  own  responsibility, 
the  best  account  of  the  facts  of  human  structure  of 
which  they  were  capable. 

The  reason  for  this  difference  is,  apparently,  the  fact 
that  while  Oxford  lecturers  on  the  Theory  of  Politics 
are  not  often  politicians,  the  training  college  lecturers 
on  the  Theory  of  Teaching  have  always  been  teachers, 
to  whom  the  question  whether  any  new  knowledge  could 
be  made  useful  in  their  art  was  one  of  living  and  urgent 
importance.  One  finds  accordingly  that  under  the 
leadership  of  men  like  Professors  William  James,  Lloyd 
Morgan,  and  Stanley  Hall,  a  progressive  science  of 
teaching  is  being  developed,  which  combines  the  study  of 
types  of  school  organization  and  method  with  a  deter- 
mined attempt  to  learn  from  special  experiments,  from 
introspection,  and  from  other  sciences,  what  manner  of 
thing  a  child  is. 

Modern  pedagogy,  based  on  modern  psychology,  is 
already  influencing  the  schools  whose  teachers  are  trained 
for  their  profession.  Its  body  of  facts  is  being  yearly 
added  to ;  it  has  already  caused  the  abandonment  of  much 
dreary  waste  of  time;  has  given  many  thousands  of  teach- 
ers a  new  outlook  on  their  work;  and  has  increased  the 


INTRODUCTION  41 


knowledge  and  happiness  of  many  tens  of  thousands  of 
children. 

This  essay  of  mine  is  offered  as  a  plea  that  a  corre- 
sponding change  in  the  conditions  of  political  science  is 
possible.  In  the  great  university  whose  constituent 
colleges  are  the  universities  of  the  world,  there  is  a 
steadily  growing  body  of  professors  and  students  of 
politics  who  give  the  whole  day  to  their  work.  I  cannot 
but  think  that  as  years  go  on,  more  of  them  will  call  to 
their  aid  that  study  of  mankind  which  is  the  ancient  ally 
of  the  moral  sciences.  Within  every  great  city  there  are 
groups  of  men  and  women  who  are  brought  together 
in  the  evenings  by  the  desire  to  find  something  more  sat- 
isfying than  current  political  controversy.  They  have 
their  own  unofficial  leaders  and  teachers,  and  among 
these  one  can  already  detect  an  impatience  with  the 
alternative  offered,  either  of  working  by  the  bare  com- 
parison of  existing  institutions,  or  of  discussing  the 
fitness  of  socialism  or  individualism,  of  democracy  or 
aristocracy  for  human  beings  whose  nature  is  taken  for 
granted. 

If  my  book  is  read  by  any  of  these  official  or  unofficial 
thinkers,  I  would  urge  that  the  study  of  human  nature 
in  politics,  if  ever  it  comes  to  be  undertaken  by  the 
united  and  organized  efforts  of  hundreds  of  learned 
men,  may  not  only  deepen  and  widen  our  knowledge  of 
political  institutions,  but  open  an  unworked  mine  of  poli- 
tical invention. 


PART  I 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF 
THE  PROBLEM 


CHAPTER    I 

IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT 
IN    POLITICS 

Whoever  sets  himself  to  base  his  political  thinking  on 
a  re-examination  of  the  working  of  human  nature,  must 
begin  by  trying  to  overcome  his  own  tendency  to  ex- 
aggerate the  intellectuality  of  mankind. 

We  are  apt  to  assume  that  every  human  action  is  the 
result  of  an  intellectual  process,  by  which  a  man  first 
thinks  of  some  end  which  he  desires,  and  then  calculates 
the  means  by  which  that  end  can  be  attained.  An  in- 
vestor, for  instance,  clesires  good  security  combined  with 
five  per  cent,  interest.  He  spends  an  hour  in  studying 
with  an  open  mind  the  price-list  of  stocks,  and  finally 
infers  that  the  purchase  of  Brewery  Debentures  will  en- 
able him  most  completely  to  realize  his  desire.  Given 
the  original  desire  for  good  security,  his  act  in  purchas- 
ing the  Debentures  appears  to  be  the  inevitable  result  of 
his  inference.  The  desire  for  good  security  itself  may 
further  appear  to  be  merely  an  intellectual  inference  as 
to  the  means  of  satisfying  some  more  general  desire, 
shared  by  all  mankind,  for  "happiness,"  our  own  "in- 
terest," or  the  like.  The  satisfaction  of  this  general  de- 
sire can  then  be  treated  as  the  supreme  "end"  of  life, 
from  which  all  our  acts  and  impulses,  great  and  small, 
are  derived  by  the  same  intellectual  process  as  that  by 

45 


46         HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

which  the  conclusion  is  derived  from  the  premises  of 
an  argument. 

This  way  of  thinking  is  sometimes  called  "common 
sense."  A  good  example  of  its  application  to  politics 
may  be  found  in  a  sentence  from  Macaulay's  celebrated 
attack  on  the  Utilitarian  followers  of  Bentham  in  the 
Edinburgh  Review  of  March  1829.  This  extreme  in- 
stance of  the  foundation  of  politics  upon  dogmatic 
psychology  is,  curiously  enough,  part  of  an  argument 
intended  to  show  that  "it  is  utterly  impossible  to  deduce 
the  science  of  government  from  the  principles  of  human 
nature."  "What  proposition,"  Macaulay  asks,  "is 
there  respecting  human  nature  which  is  absolutely  and 
universally  true?  We  know  of  only  one:  and  that  is  not 
only  true,  but  identical;  that  men  always  act  from  self- 
interest.  .  .  .  When  we  see  the  actions  of  a  man,  we 
know  with  certainty  what  he  thinks  his  interest  to  be."  1 
Macaulay  believes  himself  to  be  opposing  Benthamism 
root  and  branch,  but  is  unconsciously  adopting  and  ex- 
aggerating the  assumption  which  Bentham  shared  with 
most  of  the  other  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  cen- 
tury philosophers — that  all  motives  result  from  the  idea 
of  some  preconceived  end. 

If  he  had  been  pressed,  Macaulay  would  probably 
have  admitted  that  there  are  cases  in  which  human  acts 
and  impulses  to  act  occur  independently  of  any  idea 
of  an  end  to  be  gained  by  them.  If  I  have  a  piece  of 
grit  in  my  eye,  and  ask  some  one  to  take  it  out  with  the 

1  Edinburgh  Revieiv,  March  1829,  p  185.     (The  italics  are  mine.) 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  47 

corner  of  his  handkerchief,  I  generally  close  the  eye  as 
soon  as  the  handkerchief  comes  near,  and  always  feel  a 
strong  impulse  to  do  so.  Nobody  supposes  that  I  close 
my  eye  because,  after  due  consideration,  I  think  it  my  in- 
terest to  do  so.  Nor  do  most  men  choose  to  run  away 
in  battle,  to  fall  in  love,  or  to  talk  about  the  weather  in 
order  to  satisfy  their  desire  for  a  preconceived  end.  If, 
indeed,  a  man  were  followed  through  one  ordinary  day, 
without  his  knowing  it,  by  a  cinematographic  camera 
and  a  phonograph,  and  if  all  his  acts  and  sayings  were 
reproduced  before  him  next  day,  he  would  be  astonished 
to  find  how  few  of  them  were  the  result  of  a  deliberate 
search  for  the  means  of  attaining  ends.  He  would,  of 
course,  see  that  much  of  his  activities  consisted  in  the 
half-conscious  repetition,  under  the  influence  of  habit, 
of  movements  which  were  originally  more  fully  con- 
scious. But  even  if  all  cases  of  habit  were  excluded  he 
would  find  that  only  a  small  proportion  of  the  residue 
could  be  explained  as  being  directly  produced  by  an  in- 
tellectual calculation.  If  a  record  were  also  kept  of 
those  of  his  impulses  and  emotions  which  did  not  result 
in  action,  it  would  be  seen  that  they  were  of  the  same 
kind  as  those  which  did,  and  and  that  very  few  of  them 
were  preceded  by  that  process  which  Macaulay  takes 
for  granted. 

If  Macaulay  had  been  pressed  still  further,  he  would 
probably  have  admitted  that  even  when  an  act  is  pre- 
ceded by  a  calculation  of  ends  and  means,  it  is  not 
the  v  inevitable  result  of  that  calculation.  Even  when 
we  know  what  a  man  thinks  it  his  interest  to  do,  we  do 


48         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

not  know  for  certain  that  he  will  do  it.  The  man  who 
studies  the  Stock  Exchange  list  does  not  buy  his  Deben- 
tures, unless,  apart  from  his  intellectual  inference  on  the 
subject,  he  has  an  impulse  to  write  to  his  stockbroker 
sufficiently  strong  to  overcome  another  impulse  to  put 
the  whole  thing  off  till  the  next  day. 

Macaulay  might  even  further  have  admitted  that  the 
mental  act  of  calculation  itself  results  from,  or  is  ac- 
companied by,  an  impulse  to  calculate,  which  impulse 
may  have  nothing  to  do  with  any  anterior  consideration 
of  means  and  ends,  and  may  vary  from  the  half-con- 
scious yielding  to  a  train  of  reverie  up  to  the  obstinate 
driving  of  a  tired  brain  into  the  difficult  task  of  exact 
thought. 

The  text-books  of  psychology  now  warn  every  student 
against  the  "intellectualist"  fallacy  which  is  illustrated 
by  my  quotation  from  Macaulay.  Impulse,  it  is  now 
agreed,  has  an  evolutionary  history  of  its  own  earlier 
than  the  history  of  those  intellectual  processes  by  which 
it  is  often  directed  and  modified.  Our  inherited  organ- 
ization inclines  us  to  re-act  in  certain  ways  to  certain 
stimuli  because  such  reactions  have  been  useful  in  the 
past  in  preserving  our  species.  Some  of  the  reactions 
are  what  we  call  specifically  "instincts,"  that  is  to  say, 
impulses  towards  definite  acts  or  series  of  acts,  indepen- 
dent of  any  conscious  anticipation  of  their  probable  ef- 
fects. 1     Those  instincts  are  sometimes  unconscious  and 

1  "Instinct  is  usually  defined  as  the  faculty  of  acting  in  such  a  way  as  to 
produce  certain  ends  without  foresight  of  the  ends  and  without  previous 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  49 

involuntary;  and  sometimes,  in  the  case  of  ourselves  and 
apparently  of  other  higher  animals,  they  are  conscious 
and  voluntary.  But  the  connection  between  means  and 
ends  which  they  exhibit  is  the  result  not  of  any  contri- 
vance by  the  actor,  but  of  the  survival,  in  the  past,  of  the 
"fittest"  of  many  varying  tendencies  to  act.  Indeed  the 
instinct  persists  when  it  is  obviously  useless,  as  in  the 
case  of  a  dog  who  turns  round  to  flatten  the  grass  be- 
fore lying  down  on  a  carpet;  and  even  when  it  is  known 
to  be  dangerous,  as  when  a  man  recovering  from  ty- 
phoid hungers  for  solid  food. 

The  fact  that  impulse  is  not  always  the  result  of 
conscious  foresight  is  most  clearly  seen  in  the  case  of 
children.  The  first  impulses  of  a  baby  to  suck,  or  to 
grasp,  are  obviously  "instinctive."  But  even  when  the 
unconscious  or  unremembered  condition  of  infancy 
has  been  succeeded  by  the  connected  consciousness  of 
childhood,  the  child  will  fly  to  his  mother  and  hide 
his  face  in  her  skirts  when  he  sees  a  harmless  stranger. 
Later  on  he  will  torture  small  beasts  and  run  away  from 
big  beasts,  or  steal  fruit,  or  climb  trees,  though  no  one 
has  suggested  such  actions  to  him,  and  though  he  may 
expect  disagreeable  results  from  them. 

We  generally  think  of  "instinct"  as  consisting  of  a 
number  of  such  separate  tendencies,  each  towards  some 
distinct  act  or  series  of  acts.  But  there  is  no  reason  to 
suppose  that  the  whole  body  of  inherited  impulse  even 

education  in  the  performance" — W.  James,  Principles  of  Psychology, 
vol.  ii.  p.  383. 


50         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

among  non-human  animals  has  ever  been  divisible  in 
that  way.  The  evolutionary  history  of  impulse  must 
have  been  very  complicated.  An  impulse  which  sur- 
vived because  it  produced  one  result  may  have  per- 
sisted with  modifications  because  it  produced  another 
result;  and  side  by  side  with  impulses  towards  specific 
acts  we  can  detect  in  all  animals  vague  and  generalized 
tendencies,  often  overlapping  and  contradictory,  like 
curiosity  and  shyness,  sympathy  and  cruelty,  imitation 
and  restless  activity.  It  is  possible,  therefore,  to  avoid 
the  ingenious  dilemma  by  which  Mr.  Balfour  argues 
that  we  must  either  demonstrate  that  the  desire,  e.g.,  for 
scientific  truth,  is  lineally  descended  from  some  one  of 
the  specific  instincts  which  teach  us  "to  fight,  to  eat,  and 
to  bring  up  children,"  or  must  admit  the  supernatural 
authority  of  the  Shorter  Catechism.1 

The  prerational  character  of  many  of  our  impulses  is, 
however,  disguised  by  the  fact  that  during  the  lifetime 
of  each  individual  they  are  increasingly  modified  by 
memory  and  habit  and  thought.  Even  the  non-human 
animals  are  able  to  adapt  and  modify  their  inherited 
impulses  either  by  imitation  or  by  habits  founded  on 
individual  experience.  When  telegraph  wires,  for 
instance,  were  first  put  up  many  birds  flew  against  them 
and  were  killed.     But  although  the  number  of  those  that 

1  Reflections  suggested  by  the  New  Theory  of  Matter,  1904,  p.  21.  "So 
far  as  natural  science  can  tell  us,  every  quality  of  sense  or  intellect  which 
does  not  help  us  to  fight,  to  eat,  and  to  bring  up  children,  is  but  a  by- 
product of  the  qualities  which  do." 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  51 
— _ —  i 

were  killed  was  obviously  insufficient  to  produce  a  change 

in  the  biological  inheritance  of  the  species,  very  few 

birds  fly  against  the  wires  now.     The  young  birds  must 

have  imitated  their  elders,  who  had  learnt  to  avoid  the 

wires;  just  as  the  young  of  many  hunting  animals  are 

said  to   learn   devices   and  precautions  which   are  the 

result  of  their  parents'  experience,  and  later  to  make 

and  hand  down  by  imitation  inventions  of  their  own. 

Many  of  the  directly  inherited  impulses,  again, 
appear,  both  in  man  and  other  animals,  at  a  certain 
point  in  the  growth  of  the  individual,  and  then,  if  they 
are  checked,  die  away,  or,  if  they  are  unchecked,  formj 
habits;  and  impulses,  which  were  originally  strong  and 
useful,  may  no  longer  help  in  preserving  life,  and  may, 
like  the  whale's  legs  or  our  teeth  and  hair,  be  weak- 
ened by  biological  degeneration.  Such  temporary  or 
weakened  impulses  are  especially  liable  to  be  trans- 
ferred to  new  objects,  or  to  be  modified  by  experience 
and  thought. 

With  all  these  complicated  facts  the  schoolmaster 
has  to  deal.  In  Macaulay's  time  he  used  to  be  guided 
by  his  "common-sense,"  and  to  intellectualize  the  whole 
process.  The  unfortunate  boys  who  acted  upon  an 
ancient  impulse  to  fidget,  to  play  truant,  to  chase  cats, 
or  to  mimic  their  teacher,  were  asked,  with  repeated 
threats  of  punishment,  "why"  they  had  done  so.  They, 
being  ignorant  of  their  own  evolutionary  history,  were 
forced  to  invent  some  far-fetched  lie,  and  were  punished 
for  that  as  well.     The  trained  schoolmaster  of  today 


52         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

■ 

takes  the  existence  of  such  impulses  as  a  normal  fact; 
and  decides  how  far,  in  each  case,  he  shall  check 
them  by  relying  on  that  half-conscious  imitation  which 
makes  the  greater  part  of  class-room  discipline,  and 
how  far  by  stimulating  a  conscious  recognition  of  the 
connection,  ethical  or  penal,  between  acts  and  their 
consequences.  In  any  case  his  power  of  controlling 
instinctive  impulse  is  due  to  his  recognition  of  its 
non-intellectual  origin.  He  may  even  be  able  to 
extendi  this  recognition  to  his  own  impulses,  and  to 
overcome  the  conviction  that  his  irritability  during 
afternoon  school  in  July  is  the  result  of  an  intellectual 
conclusion  as  to  the  need  of  special  severity  in  dealing 
with  a  set  of  unprecedentedly  wicked  boys. 

The  politician,  however,  is  still  apt  to  intellectualize 
impulse  as  completely  as  the  schoolmaster  did  fifty 
years  ago.  He  has  two  excuses,  that  he  deals  entirely 
with  adults,  whose  impulses  are  more  deeply  modified 
by  experience  and  thought  than  those  of  children,  and 
that  it  is  very  difficult  for  any  one  who  thinks  about 
politics  not  to  confine  his  consideration  to  those  political 
actions  and  impulses  which  are  accompanied  by  the 
greatest  amount  of  conscious  thought,  and  which 
theiefore  come  first  into  his  mind.  But  the  politician 
thinks  about  men  in  large  communities,  and  it  is  in  the 
forecasting  of  the  action  of  large  communities  that  the 
intellectualist  fallacy  is  most  misleading.  The  results 
of  experience  and  thought  are  often  confined  to 
individuals  or  small  groups,  and  when  they  differ  may 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  53 


cancel  each  other  as  political  forces.  The  original 
human  impulses  are,  with  personal  variations,  common 
to  the  whole  race,  and  increase  in  their  importance  with 
an  increase  in  the  number  of  those  influenced  by  them. 

It  may  be  worth  while,  therefore,  to  attempt  a  de- 
scription of  some  of  the  more  obvious  or  more  important 
political  impulses,  remembering  always  that  in  politics 
we  are  dealing  not  with  such  clear-cut  separate  instincts 
as  we  may  find  in  children  and  animals,  but  with 
tendencies  often  weakened  by  the  course  of  human  evolu- 
tion, still  more  often  transferred  to  new  uses,  and  acting 
not  simply  but  in  combination  or  counteraction. 

Aristotle,  for  instance,  says  that  it  is  "affection."  (or 
"friendship,"  for  the  meaning  of  4>tAt'a  stands  halfway 
between  the  two  words)  which  "makes  political  union 
possible,"  and  "which  law-givers  consider  more  import- 
ant than  justice."  It  is,  he  says,  a  hereditary  instinct 
among  animals  of  the  same  race,  and  particularly 
among  men.1  If  we  look  for  this  political  affection  in 
its  simplest  form,  we  see  it  in  our  impulse  to  feel 
"kindly"  towards  any  other  human  being  of  whose\ 
existence  and  personality  we  become  vividly  aware. 
This  impulse  can  be  checked  and  overlaid  by  others,  but 
any  one  can  test  its  existence  and  its  prerationality  in  his 
own  case  by  going,  for  instance,  to  the  British  Museum 

1  Ethics,   Bk.   viii.   chap.    1.     *t-«»    *   bvr&PX**   &»M«  '   *   '   oi  MO"°» 
kv    dvdpJnrois   aXXa   icaliv^  opviffi   Kal   TQtS    ir\ei<TTOis    twv    £uwp,    Kal    TOIS 

bjxocdviai  irpbs  d\\i)\a,Kal  fidXiffra  tois  dvdpuirots  .  .  .  eoace  5e  Kal  rat 
ffoXets  m/wixelv  ^  0'Xt'a,  Kal  ol  vofj.o6erai  p.a\\ou  irepl  avrnv  airovda^eiv 
f)  rifv  diKaio<TVVT]v 


54         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

and  watching  the  effect  on  his  feelings  of  the  discovery 
that  a  little  Egyptian  girl  baby  who  died  four  thousand 
years  ago  rubbed  the  toes  of  her  shoes  by  crawling  upon 
the  floor. 

The  tactics  of  an  election  consist  largely  of  contriv- 
ances by  which  this  immediate  emotion  of  personal 
affection  may  be  set  up.  The  candidate  is  advised  to 
"show  himself"  continually,  to  give  away  prizes,  to  "say 
a  few  words"  at  the  end  of  other  people's  speeches — all 
under  circumstances  which  offer  little  or  no  opportunity 
for  the  formation  of  a  reasoned  opinion  of  his  merits, 
but  many  opportunities  for  the  rise  of  a  purely  instinc 
tive  affection  among  those  present.  His  portrait  is 
periodically  distributed,  and  is  more  effective  if  it  is  a 
good,  that  is  to  say,  a  distinctive,  than  if  it  is  a  flattering 
likeness.  Best  of  all  is  a  photograph  which  brings  his 
ordinary  existence  sharply  forward  by  representing 
him  in  his  garden  smoking  a  pipe  or  reading  a  news- 
paper. 

A  simple-minded  supporter  whose  affection  has  been 
so  worked  up  will  probably  try  to  give  an  intellectual 
explanation  of  it.  He  will  say  that  the  man,  of  whom 
he  may  know  really  nothing  except  that  he  was  photo- 
graphed in  a  Panama  hat  with  a  fox-terrier,  is  "the  kind 
of  man  we  want,"  and  that  therefore  he  has  decided  to 
support  him;  just  as  a  child  will  say  that  he  loves  his 
mother  because  she  is  the  best  mother  in  the  world,1  or 
a  man  in  love  will  give  an  elaborate  explanation  of  his 

1  A  rather  unusually  reflective  little  girl  of  my  acquaintance,  felt,  one 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  55 

perfectly  normal  feelings,  which  he  describes  as  an 
intellectual  inference  from  alleged  abnormal  excel- 
lences in  his  beloved.  The  candidate  naturally  intellec- 
tualizes  in  the  same  way.  One  of  the  most  perfectly 
modest  men  I  know  once  told  me  that  he  was  "going 
round"  a  good  deal  among  his  future  constituents  "to 
let  them  see  what  a  good  fellow  I  am."  Unless,  indeed, 
the  process  can  be  intellectualized,  it  is  for  many  men 
unintelligible. 

A  monarch  is  a  life-long  candidate,  and  there  exists 
a  singularly  elaborate  traditional  art  of  producing 
personal  affection  for  him.  It  is  more  important  that 
he  should  be  seen  than  that  he  should  speak  or  act.  His 
portrait  appears  on  every  coin  and  stamp,  and  apart 
from  any  question  of  personal  beauty,  produces  most 
effect  when  it  is  a  good  likeness.  Any  one,  for  instance, 
who  can  clearly  recall  his  own  emotions  during  the  later 
years  of  Queen  Victoria's  reign,  will  remember  a 
measurable  increase  of 'his  affection  for  her,  when,  in 
1897,  a  thoroughly  life-like  portrait  took  the  place  on 
the  coins  of  the  conventional  head  of  1837-1887,  and 
the  awkward  compromise  of  the  first  Jubilee  year.  In 
the  case  of  monarchy  one  can  also  watch  the  intellec- 
tualization  of  the  whole  process  by  the  newspapers,  the 
official    biographers,    the    courtiers,    and    possibly    the 

day,  while  looking  at  her  mother,  a  strong  impulse  of  affection.  She 
first  gave  the  usual  intellectual  explanation  of  her  feeling,  "Mummy,  I  do 
think  you  are  the  most  beautiful  Mummy  in  the  whole  world,"  and  then, 
after  a  moment's  thought,  corrected  herself  by  saying,  "But  there,  they 
do  say  love  is  blind." 


56         HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

monarch  himself.  The  daily  bulletion  of  details  as  to 
his  walks  and  drives  is,  in  reality,  the  more  likely  to 
create  a  vivid  impression  of  his  personality,  and  there- 
fore to  produce  this  particular  kind  of  emotion,  the 
more  ordinary  the  events  described  are  in  themselves. 
But  since  an  emotion  arising  out  of  ordinary  events  is 
difficult  to  explain  on  a  purely  intellectual  basis,  these 
events  are  written  about  as  revealing  a  life  of  extra- 
ordinary regularity  and  industry.  When  the  affection 
is  formed  it  is  even  sometimes  described  as  an  inevitable 
reasoned  conclusion  arising  from  reflection  upon  a  reign 
during  which  there  have  been  an  unusual  number  of 
good  harvests  or  great  inventions. 

Sometimes  the  impulse  of  affection  is  excited  to  a 
point  at  which  its  non-rational  character  becomes 
obvious.  George  the  Third  was  beloved  by  the  English 
people  because  they  realized  intensely  that,  like  them- 
selves, he  had  been  born  in  England,  and  because  the 
published  facts  of  his  daily  life  came  home  to  them. 
Fanny  Burney  describes,  therefore,  how  when,  during 
an  attack  of  madness,  he  was  to  be  taken  in  a  coach 
to  Kew,  the  doctors  who  were  to  accompany  him  were 
seriously  afraid  that  the  inhabitants  of  any  village  who 
saw  that  the  King  was  under  restraint  would  attack 
them.1  The  kindred  emotion  of  personal  and  dynastic 
loyalty  (whose  origin  is  possibly  to  be  found  in  the  fact 

1  Diary  of  Madame  D'Arblay,  ed.  1905,  vol.  iv,  p.  184,  "If  they  even 
attempted  force,  they  had  not  a  doubt  but  his  smallest  resistance  would 
call  up  the  whole  country  to  his  fancied  rescue." 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  57 


that  the  loosely  organized  companies  of  our  pre- 
human ancestors  could  not  defend  themselves  from  their 
carnivorous  enemies  until  the  general  instinct  of 
affection  was  specialized  into  a  vehement  impulse  to 
follow  and  protect  their  leader),  has  again  and  again 
produced  destructive  and  utterly  useless  civil  wars. 

Fear  often  accompanies  and,  in  politics,  is  confused 
with  affection.  A  man,  whose  life's  dream  it  has  been 
to  get  sight  and  speech  of  his  King,  is  accidentally 
brought  face  to  face  with  him.  He  is  "rooted  to  the 
spot,"  becomes  pale,  and  is  unable  to  speak,  because  a 
movement  might  have  betrayed  his  ancestors  to  a  lion 
or  a  bear,  or  earlier  still,  to  a  hungry  cuttlefish.  It 
would  be  an  interesting  experiment  if  some  professor  of 
experimental  psychology  would  arrange  his  class  in  the 
laboratory  with  sphygmographs  on  their  wrists  ready  to 
record  those  pulse  movements  which  accompany  the 
sensation  of  "thrill,"  and  would  then  introduce  into  the 
room  without  notice,  and  in  chance  order,  a  bishop,  a 
well-known  general,  the  greatest  living  man  of  letters, 
and  a  minor  member  of  the  royal  family.  The  resulting 
records  of  immediate  pulse  disturbances  would  be  of 
real  scientific  importance,  and  it  might  even  be  possible 
to  continue  the  record  in  each  case  say,  for  a  quarter  of 
a  minute,  and  to  trace  the  secondary  effects  of 
variations  in  political  opinions,  education,  or  the  sense 
of  humour  among  the  students.  At  present  almost  the 
only  really  scientific  observation  on  the  subject  from 
its   political   side   is  contained   in  Lord   Palmerston's 


58         HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

protest  against  a  purely  intellectual  account  of  aristoc- 
racy: "there  is  no  damned  nonsense  about  merit,"  he 
said,  "in  the  case  of  the  Garter."  Makers  of  new 
aristocracies  are  still,  however,  apt  to  intellectualize. 
The  French  government,  for  instance,  have  created  an 
order,  "Pour  le  Merite  Agricole,"  which  ought,  on  the 
basis  of  mere  logic,  to  be  very  successful;  but  one  is  told 
that  the  green  ribbon  of  that  order  produces  in  France  no 
thrill  whatever. 

The  impulse  to  laugh  is  comparatively  unimportant 
in  politics,  but  it  affords  a  good  instance  of  the  way 
in  which  a  practical  politician  has  to  allow  for  pje^. 
rationalimpul  ■=-£__  It  is  apparently  an  immediate 
effect  of  the  recognition  of  the  incongruous,  just  as 
trembling  is  of  the  recognition  of  danger.  It  may  have 
been  evolved  because  an  animal  which  suffered  a  slight 
spasm  in  the  presence  of  the  unexpected  was  more  likely 
to  be  on  its  guard  against  enemies,  or  it  may  have 
been  the  merely  accidental  result  of  some  fact  in  our 
nervous  organization  which  was  otherwise  useful. 
Incongruity  is,  however,  so  much  a  matter  of  habit  and 
association  and  individual  variation,  that  it  is  extraordi- 
narily difficult  to  forecast  whether  any  particular  act 
will  seem  ridiculous  to  any  particular  class,  or  how 
long  the  sense  of  incongruity  will  in  any  case 
persist.  Acts,  for  instance,  which  aim  at  producing 
exalted  emotional  effect  among  ordinary  slow-witted 
people — Burke's  dagger,  Louis  Napoleon's  tame  eagle, 
the  German  Kaiser's  telegrams  about  Huns  and  mailed 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  59 


fists — may  do  so,  and  therefore  be  in  the  end  politically 
successful,  although  they  produce  spontaneous  laughter 
in  men  whose  conception  of  good  political  manners  is 
based  upon  the  idea  of  self-restraint. 

Again,  almost  the  whole  of  the  economic  question 
between  socialism  and  individualism  turns  on  the  nature 
and  limitatons  of  the  desire  for  property.  There  seem 
to  be  good  grounds  for  supposing  that  this  is  a  truei 
specific  instinct,  and  not  merely  the  result  of  habit  orl 
of  the  intellectual  choice  of  means  for  satisfying  the 
desire  of  power.  Children,  for  instance,  quarrel 
furiously  at  a  very  early  age  over  apparently  worthless 
things,  and  collect  and  hide  them  long  before  they  can 
have  any  clear  notion  of  the  advantages  to  be  derived 
from  individual  possession.  Those  children  who  in 
certain  charity  schools  are  brought  up  entirely  without 
personal  property,  even  in  their  clothes  or  pocket- 
handkerchiefs,  show  every  sign  of  the  bad  effect  on 
health  and  character  which  results  from  complete 
inability  to  satisfy  a  strong  inherited  instinct.  The 
evolutionary  origin  of  the  desire  for  property  is  indicated 
also  by  many  of  the  habits  of  dogs  or  squirrels  or 
magpies.  Some  economist  ought  therefore  to  give  us  a 
treatise  in  which  this  property  instinct  is  carefully  and 
quantitatively  examined.  Is  it,  like  the  hunting  instinct, 
an  impulse  which  dies  away  if  it  is  not  indulged?  How 
far  can  it  be  eliminated  or  modified  by  education?  Is 
it  satisfied  by  a  leasehold  or  a  life-interest,  or  by  such 
an  arrangement  of  corporate  property  as  is  offered  by 


60         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

■ 

a  collegiate  foundation  or  by  the  provision  of  a  public 
park?  Does  it  require  for  its  satisfaction  material 
and  visible  things  such  as  land  or  houses,  or  is  the 
holding,  say,  of  colonial  railway  shares  sufficient?  Is 
the  absence  of  unlimited  proprietary  rights  felt  more 
strongly  in  the  case  of  personal  chattels  (such  as  furni- 
ture and  ornaments)  than  in  the  case  of  land  or 
machinery?  Does  the  degree  and  direction  of  the 
instinct  markedly  differ  among  different  individuals  or 
races,  or  between  the  two  sexes? 

Pending  such  an  inquiry  my  own  provisional  opinion 
is  that,  like  a  good  many  instincts  of  very  early  evolu- 
tionary origin,  it  can  be  satisfied  by  an  avowed  pretence; 
just  as  a  kitten  which  is  fed  regularly  on  milk  can  be 
kept  in  good  health  if  it  is  allowed  to  indulge  its  hunting 
instinct  by  playing  with  a  bobbin,  and  a  peaceful  civil 
servant  satisfies  his  instinct  of  combat  and  adventure 
at  golf.  If  this  is  so,  and  if  it  is  considered  for 
other  reasons  undesirable  to  satisfy  the  property 
instinct  by  the  possession,  say,  of  slaves  or  of  freehold 
land,  one  supposes  that  a  good  deal  of  the  feeling  of 
property  may  in  the  future  be  enjoyed,  even  by  persons 
in  whom  the  instinct  is  abnormally  strong,  through  the 
collection  of  shells  or  of  picture  postcards. 

The  property  instinct  is,  it  happens,  one  of  two 
instances  in  which  the  classical  economists  deserted 
their  usual  habit  of  treating  all  desires  as  the  result 
of  a  calculation  of  the  means  of  obtaining  "utility"  or 
"wealth."     The  satisfaction  of  the  instinct  of  absolute 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  61 

property  by  peasant  proprietorship  turned,  they  said, 
"sand  to  gold,"  although  it  required  a  larger  expen- 
diture of  labour  for  every  unit  of  income  than  was  the 
case  in  salaried  employment.  The  other  instance  was 
the  instinct  of  family  affection.  This  also  still  needs 
a  special  treatise  on  its  stimulus,  variation,  and  limita- 
tions. But  the  classical  economists  treated  it  as  absolute 
and  unvarying.  The  "economic  man,"  who  had  no  more 
concern  than  a  lone  wolf  with  the  rest  of  the  human 
species,  was  treated  as  possessing  a  perfect  and 
permanent  solidarity  of  feeling  with  his  "family."  The 
family  was  apparently  assumed  as  consisting  of  those 
persons  for  whose  support  a  man  in  Western  Europe  is 
legally  responsible,  and  no  attempt  was  made  to  estimate 
whether  the  instinct  extended  in  any  degree  to  cousins 
or  great-uncles. 

A  treatise  on  political  impulses  which  aimed  at 
completeness  would  further  include  at  least  the  fight- 
ing instinct  (with  the  part  which  it  plays,  together  with 
affection  and  loyalty,  in  the  formation  of  parties),  and 
the  instincts  of  suspicion,  curiosity,  and  the  desire  toj 
excel. 

All   these   primary   impulses   are   greatly   increasecM 
in  immediate  effectiveness  when  they  are  "pure,"  that  is  I 
to    say,   unaccompanied    by    competing    or    opposing  j 
impulses;  and  this  is  the  main  reason  why  art,  which 
aims  at  producing  one  emotion  at  a  time,  acts  on  most 
men  so  much  more  easily  than  does  the  more  varied 
appeal  of  real  life.     I  once  sat  in  a  suburban  theatre 


62         HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


among  a  number  of  colonial  troopers  who  had  come 
over  from  South  Africa  for  the  King's  Coronation. 
The  play  was  "Our  Boys,"  and  between  the  acts  my 
next  neighbour  gave  me,  without  any  sign  of  emotion, 
a  hideous  account  of  the  scene  at  Tweefontein  after  De 
Wet  had  rushed  the  British  camp  on  the  Christmas 
morning  of  1901 — the  militiamen  slaughtered  while 
drunk,  and  the  Kaffir  drivers  tied  to  the  blazing  waggons. 
The  curtain  rose  again,  and,  five  minutes  later,  I  saw 
that  he  was  weeping  in  sympathy  with  the  stage 
misfortunes  of  two  able-bodied  young  men  who  had  to 
eat  "inferior  Dorset"  butter.  My  sympathy  with  the 
militiamen  and  the  Kaffirs  was  "pure,"  whereas  his  was 
overlaid  with  remembered  race-hatred,  battle-fury,  and 
contempt  for  British  incompetence.  His  sympathy,  on 
the  other  hand,  with  the  stage  characters  was  not 
accompanied,  as  mine  was,  by  critical  feelings  about 
theatrical  conventions,  indifferent  acting,  and  middle- 
Victorian  sentiment. 

It  is  this  greater  immediate  effect  of  pure  and 
artificial  as  compared  with  mixed  and  concrete  emotion 
which  explains  the  traditional  maxim  of  political 
agents  that  it  is  better  that  a  candidate  should  not  live 
in  his  constituency.  It  is  an  advantage  that  he  should 
Be'able  to  represent  himself  as  a  "local  candidate,"  but 
his  local  character  should  be  ad  hoc,  and  should  consist 
in  the  hiring  of  a  large  house  each  year  in  which  he 
lives  a  life  of  carefully  dramatized  hospitality.  Things 
in  no  way  blameworthy  in  themselves — his  choice  of 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  63 

tradesmen,  his  childrens'  hats  and  measles,  his  difficulties 
with  his  relations — will  be,  if  he  is  a  permanent 
resident,  "out  of  the  picture,"  and  may  confuse  the 
impression  which  he  produces.  If  one  could,  by  the 
help  of  a  time-machine,  see  for  a  moment  in  the  flesh 
the  little  Egyptian  girl  who  wore  out  her  shoes,  one 
might  find  her  behaving  so  charmingly  that  one's  pity 
for  her  death  would  be  increased.  But  it  is  more 
probable  that,  even  if  she  was,  in  fact,  a  very  nice  little 
girl,  one  would  not. 

This  greater  immediate  facility  of  the  emotions  set 
up  by  artistic  presentment,  as  compared  with  those  result- 
ing from  concrete  observation,  has,  however,  to  be 
studied  in  its  relation  to  another  fact — that  impulses 
vary,  in  their  driving  force  and  in  the  depth  of  the 
nervous  disturbance  which  they  cause,  in  proportion, 
not  to  their  importance  in  our  present  life,  but  to  the 
point  at  which  they  appeared  in  our  evolutionary  past. 
We  are  quite  unable  to  resist  the  impulse  of  mere 
vascular  and  nervous  reaction,  the  watering  of  the 
mouth,  the  jerk  of  the  limb,  the  closing  of  the  eye, 
which  we  share  with  some  of  the  simplest  vertebrates. 
We  can  only  with  difficulty  resist  the  instincts  of  sex  ana) 
food,  of  anger  and  fear,  which  we  share  with  the! 
higher  animals.  It  is,  on  the  other  hand,  difficult  for] 
us  to  obey  consistently  the  impulses  which  attend  on  the/ 
mental  images  formed  by  inference  and  association./ 
A  man  may  be  convinced  by  a  long  train  of  cogent 
reasoning  that  he  will  go  to  hell  if  he  visits  a  certain 


64         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

house;  and  yet  he  will  do  so  in  satisfaction  of  a  half 
conscious  craving  whose  existence  he  is  ashamed  to 
recognize.  It  may  be  that  when  a  preacher  makes  hell 
real  to  him  by  physical  images  of  fire  and  torment  his 
conviction  will  acquire  coercive  force.  But  that  force 
may  soon  die  away  as  his  memory  fades,  and  even  the 
most  vivid  description  has  little  effect  as  compared 
with  a  touch  of  actual  pain.  At  the  theatre,  because  pure 
emotion  is  facile,  three-quarters  of  the  audience  may 
cry,  but  because  second-hand  emotion  is  shallow,  very 
few  of  them  will  be  unable  to  sleep  when  they  get  home, 
or  will  even  lose  their  appetite  for  a  late  supper.  My 
South  African  trooper  probably  recovered  from  his  tears 
over  "Our  Boys"  as  soon  as  they  were  shed.  The 
transient  and  pleasurable  quality  of  the  tragic  emotions 
produced  by  novel  reading  is  well  known.  A  man  may 
weep  over  a  novel  which  he  will  forget  in  two  or  three 
hours,  although  the  same  man  may  be  made  insane,  or 
may  have  his  character  changed  for  life,  by  actual  ex- 
periences which  are  far  less  terrible  than  those  of  which 
he  reads,  experiences  which  at  the  moment  may  produce 
neither  tears  nor  any  other  obvious  nervous  effect. 

Both  these  facts  are  of  first-rate  political  importance 
in  those  great  modern  communities  in  which  all  the 
events  which  stimulate  political  action  reach  the  voters 
through  newspapers.  The  emotional  appeal  of  journal- 
ism, even  more  than  that  of  the  stage,  is  facile  because  it 
is  pure,  and  transitory  because  it  is  second-hand. 
Battles   and    famines,    murders    and   the   evidence   of 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  65 


inquiries  into  destitution,  all  are  presented  by  the 
journalist  in  literary  form,  with  a  careful  selection  of 
'telling'  detail.  Their  effect  is  therefore  produced  at 
once,  in  the  half-hour  that  follows  the  middle-class 
breakfast,  or  in  the  longer  interval  on  the  Sunday  mor- 
ning when  the  workman  reads  his  weekly  paper.  But 
when  the  paper  has  been  read  the  emotional  effect  fades 
rapidly  away. 

Any  candidate  at  an  election  feels  for  this  reason  the 
strangeness  of  the  conditions  under  which  what  Professor 
James  calls  the  "pungent  sense  of  effective  reality,"  x 
reaches  or  fails  to  reach,  mankind,  in  a  civilization  based 
upon  newspapers.  I  was  walking  along  the  street  during 
my  last  election,  thinking  of  the  actual  issues  involved, 
and  comparing  them  with  the  vague  fog  of  journalistic 
phrases,  and  the  half-conscious  impulses  of  old  habit 
and  new  suspicion  which  make  up  the  atmosphere  of 
electioneering.  I  came  round  a  street  corner  upon  a  boy 
of  about  fifteen  returning  from  work,  whose  whole  face 
lit  up  with  genuine  and  lively  interest  as  soon  as  he  saw 
me.  I  stopped,  and  he  said:  "I  know  you,  Mr.  Wallas, 
you  put  the  medals  on  me."  All  that  day  political  prin- 
ciples and  arguments  had  refused  to  become  real  to  my 
constituents,  but  the  emotion  excited  by  the  bodily  fact 
that  I  had  at  a  school  ceremony  pinned  a  medal  for  good 

1  "The  moral  tragedy  of  human  life  comes  almost  wholly  from  the  fact 
that  the  link  is  ruptured  which  normally  should  hold  between  vision  of  the 
truth  and  action,  and  that  this  pungent  sense  of  effective  reality  will  not 
attach  to  certain  ideas."  W.  James,  Principles  of  Psychology,  vol.  ii. 
p.  547. 


66         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

attendance  on  a  boy's  coat,  had  all  the  pungency  of  a 
first-hand  experience. 

Throughout  the  contest  the  candidate  is  made  aware, 
at  every  point,  of  the  enormously  greater  solidity  for 
most  men  of  the  work-a-day  world  which  they  see  for 
themselves,  as  compared  with  the  world  of  inference  and 
secondary  ideas  which  they  see  through  the  newspapers. 
A  London  County  Councillor,  for  instance,  as  his  election 
comes  near,  and  he  begins  to  withdraw  from  the  daily 
business  of  administrative  committees  into  the  cloud  of 
the  electoral  campaign,  finds  that  the  officials  whom  he 
leaves  behind,  with  their  daily  stint  of  work,  and  their 
hopes  and  fears  about  their  salaries,  seem  to  him  much 
more  real  than  himself.  The  old  woman  at  her  door  in  a 
mean  street  who  refuses  to  believe  that  he  is  not  being 
paid  for  canvassing,  the  prosperous  and  good-natured 
tradesman  who  says  quite  simply,  "I  expect  you  find 
politics  rather  an  expensive  amusement,"  all  seem  to 
stand  with  their  feet  upon  the  ground.  However  often 
he  assures  himself  that  the  great  realities  are  on  his  side, 
and  that  the  busy  people  round  him  are  concerned  only 
with  fleeting  appearances,  yet  the  feeling  constantly 
recurs  to  him  that  it  is  he  himself  who  is  living  in  a  world 
of  shadows. 

This  feeling  is  increased  by  the  fact  that  a  candidate 
has  constantly  to  repeat  the  same  arguments,  and  to 
stimulate  in  himself  the  same  emotions,  and  that  mere 
repetition  produces  a  distressing  sense  of  unreality. 
The  preachers  who  have  to  repeat  every  Sunday  the  same 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT 


gospel,  find  also  that  "dry  times"  alternate  with  times  oP 
exaltation.  Even  among  the  voters  the  repetition  of  the 
same  political  thoughts  is  apt  to  produce  weariness.  The 
main  cause  of  the  recurring  swing  of  the  electoral  pendu- 
lum seems  to  be  that  opinions  which  have  been  held  with 
enthusiasm  become  after  a  year  or  two  stale  and  flat,  and 
that  the  new  opinions  seem  fresh  and  vivid. 

A  treatise  is  indeed  required  from  some  trained 
psychologist  on  the  conditions  under  which  our  nervous 
system  shows  itself  intolerant  of  repeated  sensations 
and  emotions.  The  fact  is  obviously  connected  with 
the  purely  physiological  causes  which  produce  giddiness, 
tickling,  sea-sickness,  etc.  But  many  things  that  are 
"natural,"  that  is  to  say,  which  we  have  constantly 
experienced  during  any  considerable  part  of  the  ages 
during  which  our  nervous  organization  was  being 
developed,  apparently  do  not  so  affect  us.  Our  heart- 
beats, the  taste  of  water,  the  rising  and  setting  of  the 
sun,  or,  in  the  case  of  a  child,  milk,  or  the  presence  of 
its  mother,  or  of  its  brothers,  do  not  seem  to  become,  in 
sound  health,  distressingly  monotonous.  But  "artificial" 
things,  however  pleasant  at  first — a  tune  on  the  piano, 
the  pattern  of  a  garment,  the  greeting  of  an  acquaintance 
— are  likely  to  become  unbearable  if  often  exactly 
repeated.  A  newspaper  is  an  artificial  thing  in  this 
sense,  and  one  of  the  arts  of  the  newspaper-writer 
consists  in  presenting  his  views  with  that  kind  of 
repetition  which,  like  the  phrases  of  a  fugue,  constantly 
approaches,  but  never  oversteps  the  limit  of  monotony. 


68         HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

Advertisers  again  are  now  discovering  that  it  pays  to 
vary  the  monotony  with  which  a  poster  appeals  to  the 
eye  by  printing  in  different  colours  those  copies  which 
are  to  hang  near  each  other,  or  still  better,  by  repre- 
senting varied  incidents  in  the  career  of  "Sunny  Jim" 
or  "Sunlight  Sue." 

A  candidate  is  also  an  artificial  thing.  If  he  lives 
and  works  in  his  constituency,  the  daily  vision  of  an 
otherwise  admirable  business  man  seated  in  a  first- 
class  carriage  on  the  8.47  A.  M.  train  in  the  same  attitude 
and  reading  the  same  newspaper  may  produce  a  slight 
and  unrecognized  feeling  of  discomfort  among  his 
constituents,  although  it  would  cause  no  such  feeling  in 
the  wife  whose  relation  to  him  is  "natural."  For  the 
same  reason  when  his  election  comes  on,  although  he 
may  declare  himself  to  be  the  "old  member  standing  on 
the  old  platform,"  he  should  be  careful  to  avoid 
monotony  by  slightly  varying  his  portrait,  the  form  of 
his  address,  and  the  details  of  his  declaration  of  political 
faith. 

Another  fact,  closely  connected  with  our  intolerance 
of  repeated  emotional  adjustment,  is  the  desire  for 
privacy,  sufficiently  marked  to  approach  the  character 
of  a  specific  instinct,  and  balanced  by  a  corresponding 
and  opposing  dread  of  loneliness.  Our  ancestors  in  the 
ages  during  which  our  present  nervous  system  became 
fixed,  lived,  apparently,  in  loosely  organized  family 
groups,  associated  for  certain  occasional  purposes  into 
larger,  but  still  more  loosely  organized,  tribal  groups. 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  69 


No  one  slept  alone,  for  the  more  or  less  monogamic 
family  assembled  nightly  in  a  cave  or  "lean  to"  shelter. 
The  hunt  for  food  which  filled  the  day  was  carried  on, 
one  supposes,  neither  in  complete  solitude  nor  in 
constant  intercourse.  Even  if  the  female  were  left  at 
home  with  the  young,  the  male  exchanged  some  dozen 
times  a  day  rough  greetings  with  acquaintances,  or 
joined  in  a  common  task.  Occasionally,  even  before 
the  full  development  of  language,  excited  palavers 
attended  by  some  hundreds  would  take  place,  or  oppo- 
sing tribes  would  gather  for  a  fight. 

It  is  still  extremely  difficult  for  the  normal  man  to 
endure  either  much  less  or  much  more  than  this  amount 
of  intercourse  with  his  fellows.  However  safe  they  may 
know  themselves  to  be,  most  men  find  it  difficult  to  sleep 
in  an  empty  house,  and  would  be  distressed  by  anything 
beyond  three  days  of  absolute  solitude.  Even  habit 
cannot  do  much  in  this  respect.  A  man  required  to 
submit  to  gradually  increasing  periods  of  solitary  con- 
finement would  probably  go  mad  as  soon  as  he  had  been 
kept  for  a  year  without  a  break.  A  settler,  though  he 
may  be  the  son  of  a  settler,  and  may  have  known  no 
other  way  of  living,  can  hardly  endure  existence 
unless  his  daily  intercourse  with  his  family  is  supple- 
mented by  a  weekly  chat  with  a  neighbour  or  a  stranger; 
and  he  will  go  long  and  dangerous  journeys  in  order  once 
a  year  to  enjoy  the  noise  and  bustle  of  a  crowd. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  nervous  system  of  most 
men  will  not  tolerate  the  frequent  repetition  of  that 


70         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

adjustment  of  the  mind  and  sympathies  to  new  acquaint- 
anceship, a  certain  amount  of  which  is  so  refreshing 
and  so  necessary.     One  can  therefore  watch  in  great 
modern  cities  men  half  consciously  striving  to  preserve 
the  same  proportion  between  privacy  and  intercourse 
which  prevailed  among  their  ancestors  in  the  woods,  and 
one  can  watch  also  the  constant  appearance  of  proposals 
or  experiments  which  altogether  ignore  the  primary  facts 
of  human  nature  in  this  respect.      The  habitual  intellec- 
tualism    of  the   writers   of   political   Utopias   prevents 
them  from  seeing  any  "reason"  why  men  should  not  find 
happiness    as    well    as    economy    in    a    sort    of    huge 
extension   of  family   life.     The  writer  himself  at  his 
moments   of  greatest  imaginative  exaltation  does  not 
perhaps  realize  the  need  of  privacy  at  all.    His  affections 
are  in  a  state  of  expansion  which,  without  fancifulness, 
one    may    refer    back    to    the    emotional    atmosphere 
prevalent  in  the  screaming  assemblies  of  his  pre-human 
ancestors ;  and  he  is  ready,  so  long  as  this  condition  lasts, 
to  take  the  whole  world  almost  literally  to  his  bosom. 
What  he  does  not  realize  is  that  neither  he  nor  any 
one  else  can  keep  himself  permanently  at  this  level. 
In  William  Morris's  "News  from  Nowhere"  the  customs 
of  family  life  extend  to  the  streets,  and  the  tired  student 
from  the  British  Museum  talks  with  easy  intimacy  to  the 
thirsty  dustman.     I  remember  reading  an  article  written 
about  1850  by  one  of  the  early  Christian  Socialists.     He 
said  that  he  had  just  been  riding  down  Oxford  Street  in 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  71 


an  omnibus,  and  that  he  had  noticed  that  when  the 
omnibus  passed  over  a  section  of  the  street  in  which 
macadam  had  been  substituted  for  paving,  all  the 
passengers  turned  and  spoke  to  each  other.  "Some 
day,"  he  said,  "all  Oxford  street  will  be  macadamized, 
and  then,  because  men  will  be  able  to  hear  each  other's 
voices,  the  omnibus  will  become  a  delightful  informal 
club."  Now  nearly  all  London  is  paved  with  wood, 
and  people  as  they  sit  in  chairs  on  the  top  of  omnibuses 
can  hear  each  other  whispering:  but  no  event  short  of 
a  fatal  accident  is  held  to  justify  a  passenger  who 
speaks  to  his  neighbour. 

Clubs  were  established  in  London,  not  so  much  for 
the  sake  of  the  cheapness  and  convenience  of  common 
sitting-rooms  and  kitchens,  as  to  bring  together  bodies 
of  men,  each  of  whom  should  meet  all  the  rest  on  terms 
of  unrestrained  social  intercourse.  One  can  see  in 
Thackeray's  "Book  of  Snobs,"  and  in  the  stories  of 
Thackeray's  own  club  quarrels,  the  difficulties  produced 
by  this  plan.  Nowadays  clubs  are  successful  exactly 
because  it  is  an  unwritten  law  in  almost  every  one  of 
them  that  no  member  must  speak  to  any  other  who  is 
not  one  of  his  own  personal  acquaintances.  The 
innumerable  communistic  experiments  of  Fournier, 
Robert  Owen,  and  others,  all  broke  up  essentially  be- 
cause of  the  want  of  privacy.  The  associates  got  on 
each  other's  nerves.  In  those  confused  pages  of  the 
"Politics,"  in  which  Aristotle  criticizes  from  the  point 


72         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


of  view  of  experience  the  communism  of  Plato,  the 
same  point  stands  out:  "It  is  difficult  to  live  together 
in  community,"  communistic  colonists  have  always  "dis- 
puted with  each  other  about  the  most  ordinary  mat- 
ters"; we  most  often  disagree  with  those  slaves  who  are 
brought  into  daily  contact  with  us."  x 

The  Charity  Schools  of  1700  to  1850  were  experiments 
in  the  result  of  a  complete  refusal  of  scope,  not  only 
for  the  instinct  of  property,  but  for  the  entirely  distinct 
instinct  of  privacy,  and  part  of  their  disastrous  nervous 
and  moral  effect  must  be  put  down  to  that.     The  boys 
in  the  contemporary  public  boarding-schools  secured  a 
little  privacy  by  the  adoption  of  strange  and   some- 
times cruel  social  customs,   and  more  has  been   done 
since    then    by    systems    of    "studies"    and    "houses." 
Experience  seems,  however,  to  show  that  during  child- 
hood   a    day    school    with    its    alternation    of    home, 
class-room,  and  playing  field,  is  better  suited  than  a 
boarding-school  to  the  facts  of  normal  human  nature. 
This  instinctive  need  of  privacy  is  again  a  subject 
which  would  repay  special  and  detailed  study.     It  varies 
very  greatly  among  different  races,  and  one  supposes 
that   the   much   greater   desire   for   privacy   which    is 
found    among    Northern,    as    compared    to    Southern 
Europeans,  may  be  due  to  the  fact  that  races  who  had 
to  spend  much  or  little  of  the  year  under  cover,  adjusted 
themselves  biologically  to  a  different  standard  in  this 
respect.     It  is  clear,  also,  that  it  is  our  emotional  nature, 

1  Politics,  Book  n.  ch.  v. 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  73 


and  not  the  intellectual  or  muscular  organs  of  talking, 
which  is  most  easily  fatigued.  Light  chatter,  even 
among  strangers,  in  which  neither  party  "gives  himself 
away,"  is  very  much  less  fatiguing  than  an  intimacy 
which  makes  some  call  upon  the  emotions.  An 
actor  who  accepts  the  second  alternative  of  Diderot's 
paradox,  and  feels  his  part,  is  much  more  likely  to  break 
down  from  overstrain,  than  one  who  only  simulates 
feeling  and  keeps  his  own  emotional  life  to  himself. 

It  is  in  democratic  politics,  however,  that  privacy  is 
most  neglected,  most  difficult,  and  most  necessary.     In 
America  all  observers  are  agreed  as  to  the  danger  which 
results   from   looking   on   a   politician    as   an   abstract 
personification  of  the  will  of  the  people,  to  whom  all 
citizens  have  an  equal  and  inalienable  right  of  access, 
and  from  whom  every  one  ought  to  receive  an  equally 
warm  and  sincere  welcome.     In  England  our  compara- 
tively aristocratic  tradition  as  to  the  relation  between 
a  representative  and  his  constituents  has  done  something 
to  preserve  customs  corresponding  more  closely  to  the 
actual  nature  of  man.     A  tired  English  statesman  at  a 
big  reception  is  still  allowed  to  spend  his  time  rather 
in  chaffing  with  a  few  friends  in  a  distant  corner  of  the 
room  than  in  shaking  hands  and  exchanging  effusive 
commonplaces  with  innumerable  unknown  guests.     But 
there  is   a   real  danger  lest  this   tradition   of  privacy 
may  be  abolished  in  English  democracy,  simply  because 
of  its  connection  with  aristocratic  manners.     A  young 
labour   politician   is    expected   to    live    in    more   than 


74         HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 


American  conditions  of  intimate  publicity.  Having, 
perhaps,  just  left  the  working  bench,  and  having  to 
adjust  his  nerves  and  his  bodily  health  to  the  difficult 
requirements  of  mental  work,  he  is  expected  to  receive 
every  caller  at  any  hour  of  the  day  or  night  with  the 
same  hearty  good  will,  and  to  be  always  ready  to  share 
or  excite  the  enthusiasm  of  his  followers.  After  a  year 
or  two,  in  the  case  of  a  man  of  sensitive  organization,  the 
task  is  found  to  be  impossible.  The  signs  of  nervous 
fatigue  are  at  first  accepted  by  him  and  his  friends  as 
proofs  of  his  sincerity.  He  begins  to  suffer  from  the 
curate's  disease,  the  bright-eyed,  hysterical  condition 
in  which  a  man  talks  all  day  long  to  a  succession  of 
sympathetic  hearers  about  his  own  overwork,  and  drifts 
into  actual  ill-health,  though  he  is  not  making  an  hour's 
continuous  exertion  in  the  day.  I  knew  a  young  agita- 
tor in  that  state  who  thought  that  he  could  not  make  a 
propagandist  speech  unless  the  deeply  admiring  pitman, 
in  whose  cottage  he  was  staying,  played  the  Marseillaise 
on  a  harmonium  before  he  started.  Often  such  a  man 
takes  to  drink.  In  any  case  he  is  liable,  as  the  East 
End  clergymen  who  try  to  live  the  same  life  are  liable, 
to  the  most  pitiable  forms  of  moral  collapse. 

Such  men,  however,  are  those  who  being  unfit  for  a 
life  without  privacy,  do  not  survive.  Greater  political 
danger  comes  perhaps  from  those  who  are  comparatively 
fit.  Anyone  who  has  been  in  America,  who  has  stood 
among  the  crowd  in  a  Philadelphia  law-court  during  the 
trial  of  a  political  case,  or  has  seen  the  thousands  of 


IMPULSE   AND   INSTINCT  75 


cartoons  in  a  contest  in  which  Tammany  is  concerned, 
will  find  that  he  has  a  picture  in  his  mind  of  one  type 
at  least  of  those  who  do  survive.  Powerfully  built, 
with  the  big  jaw  and  loose  mouth  of  the  dominant 
talker,  practised  by  years  of  sitting  behind  saloon  bars, 
they  have  learnt  the  way  of  "selling  cheap  that  which 
should  be  most  dear."  But  even  they  generally 
look  as  if  they  drank,  and  as  if  they  would  not  live  to 
old  age. 

Other  and  less  dreadful  types  of  politicians  without 
privacy  come  into  one's  mind,  the  orator  who  night  after 
night  repeats  the  theatrical  success  of  his  own  personal- 
ity, and,  like  the  actor,  keeps  his  recurring  fits  of  weary 
disgust  to  himself;  the  busy  organizing  talkative  man 
to  whom  it  is  a  mere  delight  to  take  the  chair  at  four 
smoking  concerts  a  week.  But  there  is  no  one  of  them 
who  would  not  be  the  better,  both  in  health  and  working 
power,  if  he  were  compelled  to  retire  for  six  months 
from  the  public  view,  and  to  produce  something  with 
his  own  hand  and  brain,  or  even  to  sit  alone  in  his 
own  house  and  think. 

These  facts,  in  so  far  as  they  represent  the  nervous 
disturbance  produced  by  certain  conditions  of  life  in 
political  communities,  are  again  closely  connected  with 
the  one  point  in  the  special  psychology  of  politics  which 
has  as  yet  received  any  extensive  consideration — the 
so-called  "Psychology  of  the  Crowd,"  on  which  the  late 
M.  Tarde,  M.  Le  Bon,  and  others  have  written.  In  the 
case  of  human  beings,  as  in  the  case  of  many  other 


76         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

social  and  semi-social  animals,  the  simpler  impulses — 
especially  those  of  fear  and  anger — when  they  are 
consciously  shared  by  many  physically  associated 
individuals,  may  become  enormously  exalted,  and  may 
give  rise  to  violent  nervous  disturbances.  One  may 
suppose  that  this  fact,  like  the  existence  of  laughter,  was 
originally  an  accidental  and  undesirable  result  of  the 
mechanism  of  nervous  reaction,  and  that  it  persisted 
because  when  a  common  danger  was  realized  (a  forest 
fire,  for  instance,  or  an  attack  by  beasts  of  prey),  a 
general  stampede,  although  it  might  be  fatal  to  the 
weaker  members  of  the  herd,  was  the  best  chance  of 
safety  for  the  majority. 

My  own  observation  of  English  politics  suggests  that 
in  a  modern  national  state,  this  panic  effect  of  the  com- 
bination of  nervous  excitement  with  physical  contact 
is  not  of  great  importance.  London  in  the  twentieth 
century  is  very  unlike  Paris  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
or  Florence  in  the  fourteenth,  if  only  because  it  is  very 
difficult  for  any  considerable  proportion  of  the  citizens 
to  be  gathered  under  circumstances  likely  to  produce 
the  special  "Psychology  of  the  Crowd."  I  have  watched 
two  hundred  thousand  men  assembled  in  Hyde  Park 
for  a  Labour  Demonstration.  The  scattered  platforms, 
the  fresh  air,  the  wide  grassy  space,  seemed  to  be  an 
unsuitable  environment  for  the  production  of  purely 
instinctive  excitement,  and  the  attitude  of  such  an 
assembly  in  London  is  good-tempered  and  lethargic.  A 
crowd  in  a  narrow  street  is  more  likely  to  get  "out  of 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  77 

« 

hand,"  and  one  may  see  a  few  thousand  men  in  a  large 
hall  reach  a  state  approaching  genuine  pathological 
exaltation  on  an  exciting  occasion,  and  when  they  are  in 
the  hands  of  a  practised  speaker.  But  as  they  go  out 
of  the  hall  they  drop  into  the  cool  ocean  of  London,  and 
their  mood  is  dissipated  in  a  moment.  The  mob  that 
took  the  Bastille  would  not  seem  or  feel  an  overwhelming 
force  in  one  of  the  business  streets  of  Manchester.  Yet 
such  facts  vary  greatly  among  different  races,  and  the 
exaggeration  which  one  seems  to  notice  when  reading 
the  French  sociologists  on  this  point  may  be  due  to  their 
observations  having  been  made  among  a  Latin  and  not 
a  Northern  race. 

So  far  I  have  dealt  with  the  impulses  illustrated  by 
the  internal  politics  of  a  modern  state.  But  perhaps 
the  most  important  section  in  the  whole  psychology  of 
political  impulse  is  that  which  is  concerned  not  with 
the  emotional  effect  of  the  citizens  of  any  state  upon 
each  other,  but  with  those  racial  feelings  which  reveal 
themselves  in  international  politics.  The  future  peace 
of  the  world  largely  turns  on  the  question  whether  we 
have,  as  is  sometimes  said  and  often  assumed,  an 
instinctive  affection  for  those  human  beings  whose  fea- 
tures and  colour  are  like  our  own,  combined  with  an 
instinctive  hatred  for  those  who  are  unlike  us.  On  this 
point,  pending  a  careful  examination  of  the  evidence 
by  the  psychologists,  it  is  difficult  to  dogmatize.  But 
I  am  inclined  to  think  that  those  strong  and  apparently 
simple  cases  of  racial  hatred  and  affection  which  can 


78  HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

certainly  be  found,  are  not  instances  of  a  specific  and 
universal  instinct,  but  the  result  of  several  distinct  and 
comparatively  weak  instincts  combined  and  heightened 
by  habit  and  association.  I  have  already  argued  that 
the  instinct  of  political  affection  is  stimulated  by  the 
vivid  realization  of  its  object.  Since  therefore  it  is 
easier,  at  least  for  uneducated  men,  to  realize  the  exist- 
ence of  beings  like  than  of  beings  unlike  themselves, 
affection  for  one's  like  would  appear  to  have  a  natural 
basis,  but  one  likely  to  be  modified  as  our  powers  of 
realization  are  stimulated  by  education. 

Again,  since  most  men  live,  especially  in  childhood, 
among  persons  belonging  to  the  same  race  as  themselves, 
any  markedly  unusual  face  or  dress  may  excite  the  in- 
stinct of  fear  of  that  which  is  unknown.  A  child's  fear, 
however,  of  a  strangely  shaped  or  coloured  face  is  more 
easily  obliterated  by  familiarity  than  it  would  be  if  it 
were  the  result  of  a  specific  instinct  of  race-hatred. 
White  or  Chinese  children  show,  one  is  told,  no  perman- 
ent aversion  for  Chinese  or  white  or  Hindoo  or  negro 
nurses  and  attendants.  Sex  love,  again,  even  when  op- 
posed by  social  tradition,  springs  up  freely  between  very 
different  human  types;  and  widely  separated  races  have 
been  thereby  amalgamated.  Between  some  of  the  non- 
human  species  (horses  and  camels,  for  instance)  instinc- 
tive mutual  hatred,  as  distinguished  from  fear,  does 
seem  to  exist,  but  nowhere,  as  far  as  I  know,  is  it  found 
between  varieties  so  nearly  related  to  each  other  and  so 
readily  interbreeding  as  the  various  human  races. 


IMPULSE   AND    INSTINCT  79 

Anglo-Indian  officials  sometimes  explain,  as  a  case 
of  specific  instinct,  the  fact  that  a  man  who  goes  out 
with  an  enthusiastic  interest  in  the  native  races  often 
finds  himself,  after  a  few  years,  unwillingly  yielding 
to  a  hatred  of  the  Hindoo  racial  type.  But  the  account 
which  they  give  of  their  sensations  seems  to  me  more 
like  the  nervous  disgust  which  I  described  as  arising 
from  a  constantly  repeated  mental  and  emotional 
adjustment  to  inharmonious  surroundings.  At  the  age 
when  an  English  official  reaches  India  most  of  his 
emotional  habits  are  already  set,  and  he  makes,  as  a 
rule,  no  systematic  attempt  to  modify  them.  There- 
fore, just  as  the  unfamiliarity  of  French  cookery  or 
German  beds,  which  at  the  beginning  of  a  continental 
visit  is  a  delightful  change,  may  become  after  a  month 
or  two  an  intolerable  gene,  so  the  servility  and  untruth- 
fulness, and  even  the  patience  and  cleverness  of  those 
natives  with  whom  he  is  brought  into  official  contact, 
get  after  a  few  years  on  the  nerves  of  an  Anglo-Indian. 
Intimate  and  uninterrupted  contact  during  a  long 
period,  after  his  social  habits  have  been  formed,  with 
people  of  his  own  race  but  of  a  different  social  tradi- 
tion would  produce  the  same  effect. 

Perhaps,  however,  intellectual  association  is  a  larger 
factor  than  instinct  in  the  causation  of  racial  affection 
and  hatred.  An  American  working  man  associates, 
for  instance,  the  Far  Eastern  physical  type  with  that 
lowering  of  the  standard  wage  which  overshadows  as  a 
dreadful  possibility  every  trade  in  the  industrial  world. 


80         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


Fifty  years  ago  the  middle  class  readers  to  whom 
Punch  appeals  associated  the  same  type  with  stories 
of  tortured  missionaries  and  envoys.  After  the  battle 
of  the  Sea  of  Japan  they  associated  it  with  that  kind 
of  heroism  which,  owing  to  our  geographical  positiion, 
we  most  admire;  and  drawings  of  the  unmistakably 
Asiatic  features  of  Admiral  Togo,  which  would  have 
excited  genuine  and  apparently  instinctive  disgust  in 
1859,  produced  a  thrill  of  affection  in  1906. 

But  at  this  point  we  approach  that  discussion  of  the 
objects,  sensible  or  imaginary,  of  political  impulse  (as 
distinguished  from  the  impulses  themselves),  which 
must  be  reserved  for  my  next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  II 
POLITICAL   ENTITIES 


Man's  impulses  and  thoughts  and  acts  result  from  the 
relation  between  his  nature  and  the  environment  into 
which  he  is  born.  The  last  chapter  approached  that 
relation  (in  so  far  as  it  affects  politics)  from  the  side 
of  man's  nature.  This  chapter  will  approach  the  same 
relation  from  the  side  of  man's  political  environment. 

The  two  lines  of  approach  have  this  important 
difference,  that  the  nature  with  which  man  is  born  is 
looked  on  by  the  politician  as  fixed,  while  the  environ- 
ment into  which  man  is  born  is  rapidly  and  indefinitely 
changing.  It  is  not  to  changes  in  our  nature,  but  to 
changes  in  our  environment  only — using  the  word  to 
include  the  traditions  and  expedients  which  we  acquire 
after  birth  as  well  as  our  material  surroundings — that 
all  our  political  development  from  the  tribal  organiza- 
tion of  the  Stone  Ages  to  the  modern  nation  has  appar- 
ently been  due. 

The  biologist  looks  on  human  nature  itself  as  chang- 
ing, but  to  him  the  period  of  a  few  thousands  or  tens 
of  thousands  of  years  which  constitute  the  past  of 
politics  is  quite  insignificant.  Important  changes  in 
biological  types  may  perhaps  have  occurred  in  the  his- 

81 


82         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


tory  of  the  world  during  comparatively  short  periods, 
but  they  must  have  resulted  either  from  a  sudden  biologi- 
cal "sport"  or  from  a  process  of  selection  fiercer  and 
more  discriminating  than  we  believe  to  have  taken  place 
in  the  immediate  past  of  our  own  species.  The  present 
descendants  of  those  races  which  are  pictured  in  early 
Egyptian  tombs  show  no  perceptible  change  in  their 
bodily  appearance,  and  there  is  no  reason  to  believe 
that  the  mental  faculties  and  tendencies  with  which  they 
are  born  have  changed  to  any  greater  degree. 

The  numerical  proportions  of  different  races  in  the 
world  have,  indeed,  altered  during  that  period,  as  one 
race  proved  weaker  in  war  or  less  able  to  resist  disease 
than  another;   and  races  have  been  mingled  by  marriage 
following  upon  conquest.     But  if  a  baby  could  now  be 
exchanged  at  birth  with  one  born  of  the  same  breeding- 
stock  even   a  hundred  thousand   years  ago,   one  may 
suppose  that  neither  the  ancient  nor  the  modern  mother 
would  notice  any  startling  difference.     The  child  from 
the  Stone  Age  would  perhaps  suffer  more  seriously  than 
our  children  if  he  caught  measles,  or  might  show  some- 
what keener  instincts  in  quarrelling  and  hunting,  or  as 
he  grew  up  be  rather  more  conscious  than  his  fellows 
of  the  "will  to  live"  and  "the  joy  of  life."     Conversely, 
a    transplanted    twentieth-century    child    would    resist 
infectious  disease  better  than  the  other  children  in  the 
Stone  Age,  and  might,  as  he  grew  up,  be  found  to  have 
a  rather  exceptionally  colourless  and  adaptable  char- 
acter.    But  there  apparently  the  difference  would  end. 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  83 

In  essentials  the  type  of  each  human  stock  may  be  sup- 
posed to  have  remained  unchanged  throughout  the 
the  whole  period.  In  the  politics  of  the  distant  future 
that  science  of  eugenics  which  aims  at  rapidly  improv- 
ing our  type  by  consciously  directed  selective  breeding 
may  become  a  dominant  factor,  but  it  has  had  little 
influence  on  the  politics  of  the  present  or  the  past. 

Those  new  facts  in  our  environment  which  have  pro- 
duced the  enormous  political  changes  which  separate 
us  from  our  ancestors  have  been  partly  new  habits  of 
thought  and  feeling,  and  partly  new  entities  about  which 
we  can  think  and  feel. 

It  is  of  these  new  political  entities  that  this  chapter 
will  treat.  They  must  have  first  reached  us  through 
our  senses,  and  in  this  case  almost  entirely  through 
the  senses  of  seeing  and  hearing.  But  man,  like  other 
animals,  lives  in  an  unending  stream  of  sense  impres- 
sions, of  innumerable  sights  and  sounds  and  feelings, 
and  is  only  stirred  to  deed  or  thought  by  those  which 
he  recognizes  as  significant  to  him.  How  then  did  the 
new  impressions  separate  themselves  from  the  rest  and 
become  sufficiently  significant  to  produce  political 
results? 

The  first  requisite  in  anything  which  is  to  stimulate 
us  toward  impulse  or  action  is  that  it  should  be  recog- 
nizable— that  it  should  be  like  itself  when  we  met  it 
before,  or  like  something  else  which  we  have  met  before. 
If  the  world  consisted  of  things  which  constantly  and 
arbitrarily  varied  their  appearance,  if  nothing  was  ever 


84         HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

like  anything  else,  or  like  itself  for  more  than  a  moment 
at  a  time,  living  beings  as  at  present  constituted  would 
not  act  at  all.  They  would  drift  like  seaweed  among 
the  waves. 

The  new-born  chicken  cowers  beneath  the  shadow  of 
the  hawk,  because  one  hawk  is  like  another.  Animals 
wake  at  sunrise,  because  one  sunrise  is  like  another; 
and  find  nuts  or  grass  for  food,  because  each  nut  and 
blade  of  grass  is  like  the  rest. 

But  the  recognition  of  likeness  is  not  in  itself  a  suf- 
ficient stimulus  to  action.  The  thing  recognized  must 
also  be  significant,  must  be  felt  in  some  way  to  matter 
to  us.  The  stars  re-appear  nightly  in  the  heavens,  but, 
as  far  as  we  can  tell,  no  animals  but  men  are  stimulated 
to  action  by  recognizing  them.  The  moth  is  not  stimu- 
lated by  recognizing  a  tortoise,  nor  the  cow  by  a  cob- 
web. 

Sometimes  this  significance  is  automatically  indicated 
to  us  by  nature.  The  growl  of  a  wild  beast,  the  sight 
of  blood,  the  cry  of  a  child  in  distress,  stand  out,  with- 
out need  of  experience  or  teaching,  from  the  stream 
of  human  sensations,  just  as,  to  a  hungry  fox-club,  the 
movement  or  glimpse  of  a  rabbit  among  the  under- 
growth separates  itself  at  once  from  the  sounds  of  the 
wind  anti  the  colours  of  the  leaves  and  flowers.  Some- 
times the  significance  of  a  sensation  has  to  be  learned 
by  the  individual  animal  during  its  own  life,  as  when 
a  dog,  who  recognizes  the  significance  of  a  rat  by 
instinct,  learns  to  recognize  that  of  a  whip  (provided 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  85 


it  looks  like  the  whip  which  he  saw  and  felt  before) 
by  experience  and  association. 

In  politics  man  has  to  make  like  things  as  well  as 
to  learn  their  significance.  Political  tactics  would 
indeed  be  a  much  simpler  matter  if  ballot-papers  were 
a  natural  product,  and  if  on  beholding  a  ballot-paper 
at  about  the  age  of  twenty-one  a  youth  who  had  never 
heard  of  one  before  were  invariably  seized  with  a  desire 
to  vote. 

The  whole  ritual  of  social  and  political  organization 
among   savages,   therefore,    illustrates   the   process   of 
creating  artificial  and  easily  recognizable  political  like- 
nesses.    If  the  chief  is  to  be  recognized  as  a  chief  he 
must,  like  the  ghost  of  Patroclus,  "be  exceedingly  like 
unto  himself."     He  must  live  in  the  same  house,  wear 
the  same  clothes,  and  do  .the  same  things  year  by  year; 
and  his  successor  must  imitate  him.     If  a  marriage  or 
an  act  of  sale  is  to  be  recognized  as  a  contract,  it  must 
be  carried  out  in  the  customary  place  and  with  the  cus- 
tomary gestures.     In  some  few  cases  the  things  thus  arti- 
ficially brought  into  existence  and  made  recognizable 
still  produces  its  impulsive  effect  by  acting  on  those  bio- 
logically inherited  associations  which  enable  man  and 
C other  animals  to  interpret  sensations  without  experience. 
The  scarlet  paint  and  wolfskin  headdress  of  a  warrior, 
or  the  dragon-mask  of  a  medicine  man,  appeal,  like  the 
smile  of  a  modern  candidate,  directly  to  our  instinctive 
nature.     But  even  in  very  early  societies  the  recognition 
of  artificial  political  entities  must  generally  have  owed 


86         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


its  power  of  stimulating  impulse  to  associations  acquired 
during  life.  A  child  who  had  been  beaten  by  the  her- 
ald's rod,  or  had  seen  his  father  bow  down  before  the 
king  or  a  sacred  stone,  learned  to  fear  the  rod,  or  the 
king,  or  the  stone  by  association. 

Recognition  often  attaches  itself  to  certain  special 
points  (whether  naturally  developed  or  artificially  made) 
in  the  thing  recognized.     Such  points  then  become  sym- 
bols of  the  thing  as  a  whole.     The  evolutionary  facts 
of  mimicry  in  die  lower  animals  show  that  to  some  flesh- 
eating  insects  a  putrid  smell  is  a  sufficiently  convincing 
symbol  of  carrion  to  induce  them  to  lay  their  eggs  in  a 
flower,  and  that  the  black  and  yellow  bands  of  the  wasp 
if  imitated  by  a  fly  are  a  sufficient  symbol  to  keep  off 
birds.1     In  early  political  society  most  recognition  is 
guided  by  such  symbols.     One  cannot  make  a  new  king, 
who  may  be  a  boy,  in  all  respects  like  his  predecessor, 
who  may  have  been  an  old  man.     But  one  can  tattoo 
both  of  them  with  the  same  pattern.     It  is  even  more 
easy  and  less  painful  to  attach  a  symbol  to  a  king  which 
is  not  a  part  of  the  man  himself,  a  royal  staff  for 
instance,  which  may  be  decorated  and  enlarged  until 
it  is  useless  as  a  staff,  but  unmistakable  as  a  symbol. 
The  king  is  then  recognized  as  king  because  he  is  the 
"staff-bearer"      (o-KipToiixos  /WAeu's).     Such  a   staff  is 
very  like  a  name,  and  there  may,  perhaps,  have  been 

1Cf.  William  James,  Principles  of  Psychology,  vol.  ii.  p.  392:— "The 
whole  story  of  our  dealings  with  the  lower  wild  animals  is  the  history  of 
our  taking  advantage  of  the  ways  in  which  they  judge  of  everything  by 
its  mere  label,  as  it  were,  so  as  to  ensnare  or  kill  them." 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  87 

an  early  Mexican  system  of  sign-writing  in  which  a 
model  of  a  staff  stood  for  a  king. 

At  this  point  it  is  already  difficult  not  to  intellec- 
tualize  the  whole  process.  Our  "common-sense" 
and  the  systematized  common-sense  of  the  eighteenth- 
century  philosophers  would  alike  explain  the  fear  of  tri- 
bal man  for  a  royal  staff  by  saying  that  he  was  reminded 
thereby  of  the  original  social  contact  between  ruler 
and  ruled,  or  of  the  pleasure  and  pain  which  experience 
had  shown  to  be  derived  from  royal  leadership  and  royal 
punishment,  and  that  he  therefore  decided  by  a  process 
of  reasoning  on  seeing  the  staff  to  fear  the  king. 

When  the  symbol  by  which  our  impulse  is  stimu- 
lated is  actual  language,  it  is  still  more  difficult  not 
to  confuse  acquired  emotional  association  with  the  full 
process  of  logical  inference.  Because  one  of  the  effects 
of  those  sounds  and  signs  which  we  call  language  is 
to  stimulate  in  us  a  process  of  deliberate  logical  thought 
we  tend  to  ignore  all  their  other  effects.  Nothing  is 
easier  than  to  make  a  description  of  the  logical  use  of 
language,  the  breaking  up  by  abstraction  of  a  bundle 
of  sensations — one's  memory,  for  instance,  of  a  royal 
person;  the  selection  of  a  single  quality — kingship,  for 
instance — shared  by  other  such  bundles  of  sensations, 
the  giving  to  that  quality  the  name  king,  and  the  use  of 
the  name  to  enable  us  to  repeat  the  process  of  abstrac- 
tion. When  we  are  consciously  trying  to  reason  cor- 
rectly by  the  use  of  language  all  this  does  occur,  just 
as  it  would  occur  if  we  had  not  evolved  the  use  of  voice- 


88         HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

• 

language  at  all,  and  were  attempting  to  construct  a  valid 
logic  of  colours  and  models  and  pictures.  But  any 
text-book  of  psychology  will  explain  why  it  errs,  both 
by  excess  and  defect,  if  taken  as  a  description  of  that 
which  actually  happens  when  language  is  used  for  the 
purpose  of  stimulating  us  to  action. 

Indeed  the  "brass-instrument  psychologists,"  who  do 
such  admirable  work  in  their  laboratories,  have  invented 
an  experiment  on  the  effect  of  significant  words  which 
every  one  may  try  for  himself.  Let  him  get  a  friend 
to  write  in  large  letters  on  cards  a  series  of  common 
political  terms,  nations,  parties,  principles,  and  so  on. 
Let  him  then  sit  before  a  watch  recording  tenths  of 
seconds,  turn  up  the  cards,  and  practise  observation  of 
the  associations  which  successively  enter  his  conscious- 
ness. The  first  associations  revealed  will  be  automatic 
and  obviously  "illogical."  If  the  word  be  "England" 
the  white  and  black  marks  on  the  paper  will,  if  the 
experimenter  is  a  "visualizer,"  produce  at  once  a  picture 
of  some  kind  accompanied  by  a  vague  and  half  con- 
scious emotional  reaction  of  affection,  perhaps,  or 
anxiety,  or  the  remembrance  of  puzzled  thought.  If 
the  experimenter  is  "audile,"  the  marks  will  first  call 
up  a  vivid  sound  image  with  which  a  like  emotional 
reaction  may  be  associated.  I  am  a  "visualizer,"  and 
the  picture  in  my  case  was  a  blurred  triangular  outline. 
Other  "visualizers"  have  described  to  me  the  picture  of 
a  red  flag,  or  of  a  green  field  (seen  from  a  railway 
carriage),  as  automatically  called  up  by  the  word  Eng- 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  89 

land.  After  the  automatic  picture  or  sound  image  and 
its  purely  automatic  emotional  accompaniment  comes 
the  "meaning"  of  the  word,  the  things  one  knows  about 
England,  which  are  presented  to  the  memory  by  a  pro- 
cess semi-automatic  at  first,  but  requiring  before  it  is 
exhausted  a  severe  effort.  The  question  as  to  what 
images  and  feelings  shall  appear  at  each  stage  is,  of 
course,  settled  by  all  the  thoughts  and  events  of  our 
past  life,  but  they  appear,  in  the  earlier  moments  at 
least  of  the  experiment,  before  we  have  time  con- 
sciously to  reflect  or  choose. 

A  corresponding  process  may  be  set  up  by  other 
symbols  besides  language.  If  in  the  experiment  the 
hats  belonging  to  members  of  a  family  be  substituted 
for  the  written  cards,  the  rest  of  the  process  will  go 
on — the  automatic  "image,"  automatically  accompanied 
by  emotional  association,  being  succeeded  in  the  course 
of  a  second  or  so  by  the  voluntary  realization  of  "mean- 
ing," and  finally  by  a  deliberate  effort  of  recollection 
and  thought.  Tennyson,  partly  because  he  was  a  born 
poet,  and  partly  perhaps  because  his  excessive  use  of 
tobacco  put  his  brain  occasionally  a  little  out  of  focus, 
was  extraordinarily  accurate  in  his  account  of  those 
separate  mental  states  which  for  most  men  are  merged 
into  one  by  memory.  A  song,  for  instance,  in  the  "Prin- 
cess," describes  the  succession  which  I  have  been  discuss- 
ing:— 

'Thy  voice  is  heard  through  rolling  drums, 
That  beat  to  battle  where  he  stands. 


90         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

.  i 

Thy  face  across  his  fancy  comes, 

And  gives  the  battle  to  his  hands: 
A  moment,  while  the  trumpets  blow, 

He  sees  his  brood  about  thy  knee; 
The  next,  like  fire  he  meets  the  foe, 

And  strikes  him  dead  for  thine  and  thee.' 

"Thine  and  thee"  at  the  end  seem  to  me  to  express 
precisely  the  change  from  the  automatic  images  of 
"voice"  and  "face"  to  the  reflective  mood  in  which  the 
full  meaning  of  that  for  which  he  fights  is  realized. 

But  it  is  the  "face"  that  "gives  the  battle  to  his  hands." 
Here  again,  as  we  saw  when  comparing  impulses  them- 
selves, it  is  the  evolutionarily  earlier,  more  automatic, 
fact  that  has  the  greater,  and  the  later  intellectual  fact 
which  has  the  less  impulsive  power.  Even  as  one  sits 
in  one's  chair  one  can  feel  that  that  is  so. 

Still  more  clearly  can  one  feel  it  if  one  thinks  of  the 
phenomena  of  religion.  The  only  religion  of  any  im- 
portance which  has  ever  been  consciously  constructed 
by  a  psychologist  is  the  Positivism  of  Auguste  Comte. 
In  order  to  produce  a  sufficiently  powerful  stimulus  to 
ensure  moral  action  among  the  distractions  and  tempta- 
tions of  daily  life,  he  required  each  of  his  disciples  to 
make  for  himself  a  visual  image  of  Humanity.  The 
disciple  was  to  practise  mental  contemplation,  for  a 
definite  period  each  morning,  of  the  remembered  figure 
of  some  known  and  loved  woman — his  mother,  or  wife, 
or  sister.  He  was  to  keep  the  figure  always  in  the  same 
attitude  and  dress,  so  that  it  should  always  present  itself 


POLITICAL  ENTITIES  91 


automatically  as  a  definite  mental  image  in  immediate 
association  with  the  word  Humanite.1  With  that  would 
be  automatically  associated  the  original  impulse  of  affec- 
tion for  the  person  imaged.  As  soon  as  possible  after 
that  would  come  the  meaning  of  the  word,  and  the  fuller 
but  less  cogent  emotional  associations  connected  with 
that  meaning.  This  invention  was  partly  borrowed  from 
certain  forms  of  mental  discipline  in  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church,  and  partly  suggested  by  Comte's  own  experi- 
ences of  the  effect  on  him  of  the  image  of  Madame  de 
Vaux.  One  of  the  reasons  that  it  has  not  come  into 
greater  use  may  have  been  that  men  in  general  are  not 
quite  such  good  "visualizers"  as  Comte  found  himself 
to  be. 

Cardinal  Newman,  in  an  illuminating  passage  of  his 
Apologia,  explains  how  he  made  for  himself  images  of 
personified  nations,  and  hints  that  behind  his  belief  in 
the  real  existence  of  such  images  was  his  sense  of  the 
convenience  of  creating  them.  He  says  that  he  identi- 
fied the  "character  and  the  instinct"  of  "states  and  gov- 
ernments" and  of  those  "religious  communities,"  from 
which  he  suffered  so  much,  with  spirits  "partially  fallen, 
capricious,  wayward;  noble  or  crafty,  benevolent  or 
malicious,  as  the  case  might  be.  .  .  .  My  preference 
of  the  Personal  to  the  Abstract  would  naturally  lead 
me  to  this  view.     I  thought  it  countenanced  by  the  men- 

1  The  Catechism  of  Positive  Religion  (Tr.  by  Congreve),  First  Part, 
"Explanation  of  the  Worship."  e.g.  p.  65:  "The  Positivist  shuts  his 
eyes  during  his  private  prayers,  the  better  to  see  the  internal  image." 


92         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

tion  of  the  'Prince  of  Persia'  in  the  prophet  Daniel: 
and  I  think  I  considered  that  it  was  of  such  intermediate 
beings  that  the  Apocalypse  spoke,  when  it  introduced 
'the  angels  of  the  seven  churches.' 

"In  1837  ...  I  said  .  .  .  'Take  England  with  many 
high  virtues  and  yet  a  low  Catholicism.  It  seems  to  me 
that  John  Bull  is  a  spirit  neither  of  Heaven  nor  Hell.' ' 

Harnack,  in  the  same  way,  when  describing  the  causes 
of  the  expansion  of  Christianity,  lays  stress  on  the  use 
of  the  word  "church"  and  the  "possibilities  of  personifi- 
cation which  it  offered.  2  This  use  may  have  owed  its 
origin  to  a  deliberate  intellectual  effort  of  abstraction 
applied  by  some  Christian  philosopher  to  the  common 
qualities  of  all  Christian  congregations,  though  it  more 
likely  resulted  from  a  half  conscious  process  of  adapta- 
tion in  the  employment  of  a  current  term.  But  when  it 
was  established  the  word  owed  its  tremendous  power 
over  most  men  to  the  emotions  automatically  stimulated 
by  the  personification,  and  not  to  those  which  would 
follow  on  a  full  analysis  of  the  meaning.  Religious 
history  affords  innumerable  such  instances.  The  "truth 
embodied  in  a  tale"  has  more  emotional  power  than  the 
unembodied  truth,  and  the  visual  realization  of  the  cen- 
tral figure  of  the  tale  more  power  than  the  tale  itself. 
The  sound-image  of  a  sacred  name  at  which  "every  knee 
shall  bow,"  or  even  of  one  which  may  be  formed  in  the 
mind  but  may  not  be  uttered  by  the  lips,  has  more 

1  Newman,  Apologia  (1864),  pp.91,  92. 

2  Harnack,  Expansion  of  Christianity  (Tr.),  vol.  ii.  p.  11. 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  93 

■ 

power  at  the  moment  of  intensest  feeling- than  the  real- 
ization of  its  meaning.  Things  of  the  sense — the  sa- 
cred food  which  one  can  taste,  the  Virgin  of  Kevlaar 
whom  one  can  see  and  touch,  are  apt  to  be  more  real  than 
their  heavenly  anti-types. 

If  we  turn  to  politics  for  instances  of  the  same  fact, 
we  again  discover  how  much  harder  it  is  there  than  in 
religion,  or  morals,  or  education,  to  resist  the  habit  of 
giving  intellectual  explanations  of  emotional  experi- 
ences. For  most  men  the  central  political  entity  is  their 
country.  When  a  man  dies  for  his  country,  what  does 
he  die  for?  The  reader  in  his  chair  thinks  of  the  size 
and  climate,  the  history  and  population,  of  some  region 
in  the  atlas,  and  explains  the  action  of  the  patriot  by 
his  relation  to  all  these  things.  But  what  seems  to  hap- 
pen in  the  crisis  of  battle  is  not  the  logical  building  up 
or  analyzing  of  the  idea  of  one's  country,  but  that  auto- 
matic selection  by  the  mind  of  some  thing  of  sense 
accompanied  by  an  equally  automatic  emotion  of  affec- 
tion which  I  have  already  described.  Throughout  his 
life  the  conscript  has  lived  in  a  stream  of  sensations,  the 
printed  pages  of  the  geography  book,  the  sight  of  streets 
and  fields  and  faces,  the  sound  of  voices  or  of  birds  or 
rivers,  all  of  which  go  to  make  up  the  infinity  of  facts 
from  which  he  might  abstract  an  idea  of  his  country. 
What  comes  to  him  in  the  final  charge?  Perhaps  the 
row  of  pollard  elms  behind  his  birth-place.  More  likely 
some  personification  of  his  country,  some  expedient  of 
custom  or  imagination  for  enabling  an  entity  which  one 


94         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

can  love  to  stand  out  from  the  unrealized  welter  of 
experience.  If  he  is  an  Italian  it  may  be  the  name,  the 
musical  syllables,  of  Italia.  If  he  is  a  Frenchman,  it 
may  be  the  marble  figure  of  France  with  her  broken 
sword,  as  he  saw  it  in  the  market-square  of  his  native 
town,  or  the  maddening  pulse  of  the  "Marseillaise." 
Romans  have  died  for  a  bronze  eagle  on  a  wreathed 
staff,  Englishmen  for  a  flag,  Scotchmen  for  the  sound 
of  the  pipes. 

Once  in  a  thousand  years  a  man  may  stand  in  a 
funeral  crowd  after  the  fighting  is  over,  and  his  heart 
may  stir  within  him  as  he  hears  Pericles  abstract  from 
the  million  qualities  of  individual  Athenians  in  the  pres- 
ent and  the  past  just  those  that  make  the  meaning  of 
Athens  to  the  world.  But  afterwards  all  that  he  will 
remember  may  be  the  cadence  of  Pericles'  voice,  the 
movement  of  his  hand,  or  the  sobbing  of  some  mother 
of  the  dead. 

In  the  evolution  of  politics,  among  the  most  impor- 
tant events  have  been  the  successive  creations  of  new 
moral  entities — of  such  ideals  as  justice,  freedom,  right. 
In  their  origin  that  process  of  conscious  logical  abstrac- 
tion, which  we  are  tempted  to  accept  as  the  explanation 
of  all  mental  phenomena,  must  have  corresponded  in 
great  part  to  the  historical  fact.  We  have,  for  instance, 
contemporary  accounts  of  the  conversations  in  which 
Socrates  compared  and  analysed  the  unwilling  answers 
of  jurymen  and  statesmen,  and  we  know  that  the  word 
Justice  was  made  by  his  work  an  infinitely  more  effec- 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  95 


tive  political  term.  It  is  certain  too  that  for  many- 
centuries  before  Socrates  the  slow  adaptation  of  the  same 
word  by  common  use  was  from  time  to  time  quickened 
by  some  forgotten  wise  man  who  brought  to  bear  upon 
it  the  intolerable  effort  of  conscious  thought.  But  as 
soon  as,  at  each  stage,  the  work  was  done,  and  Justice, 
like  a  rock  statue  on  which  successive  generations  of 
artists  have  toiled,  stood  out  in  compelling  beauty,  she 
was  seen  not  as  an  abstraction  but  as  a  direct  revelation. 
It  is  true  that  this  revelation  made  the  older  symbols 
mean  and  dead,  but  that  which  overcame  them  seemed 
a  real  and  visible  thing,  not  a  difficult  process  of  com- 
parison and  analysis.  Antigone  in  the  play  defied  in 
the  name  of  Justice  the  command  which  the  sceptre-bear- 
ing king  had  sent  through  the  sacred  person  of  his  her- 
ald. But  Justice  to  her  was  a  goddess,  "housemate  of 
the  nether  gods" — and  the  sons  of  those  Athenian  citi- 
zens who  applauded  the  Antigone  condemned  Socrates 
to  death  because  his  dialectic  turned  the  gods  back  into 
abstractions. 

The  great  Jewish  prophets  owed  much  of  their  spirit- 
ual supremacy  to  the  fact  that  they  were  able  to  present 
a  moral  idea  with  intense  emotional  force  without  stif- 
fening it  into  a  personification;  but  that  was  because 
they  saw  it  always  in  relation  to  the  most  personal  of  all 
gods.  Amos  wrote,  "I  hate,  I  despise  your  feasts,  and  I 
will  not  smell  the  savour  of  your  assemblies.  .  .  .  Take 
thou  away  from  me  the  noise  of  thy  songs;  for  I  will 
not  hear  the  melody  of  thy  viols.     But  let  judgment  roll 


96         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

down  as  waters,  and  righteousness  as  an  ever-flowing 
stream."  Here  "judgment"  and  "righteousness"  are 
not  goddesses;  but  the  voice  which  Amos  heard  was  not 
the  voice  of  an  abstraction. 

Sometimes  a  new  moral  or  political  entity  is  created 
rather  by  immediate  insight  than  by  the  slow  process 
of  deliberate  analysis.  Some  seer  of  genius  perceives 
in  a  flash  the  essential  likeness  of  things  hitherto  kept 
apart  in  men's  mind — the  impulse  which  leads  to  anger 
with  one's  brother,  and  that  which  leads  to  murder,  the 
charity  of  the  widow's  mite  and  of  the  rich  man's  gold, 
the  intemperance  of  the  debauchee  and  of  the  party 
leader.  But  when  the  master  dies  the  vision  too  often 
dies  with  him.  Plato's  "ideas"  became  the  formulae 
of  a  system  of  magic,  and  the  command  of  Jesus  that 
one  should  give  all  that  one  had  to  the  poor  handed 
over  one-third  of  the  land  of  Europe  to  be  the  untaxed 
property  of  wealthy  ecclesiastics. 

It  is  this  last  relation  between  words  and  things 
which  makes  the  central  difficulty  of  thought  about 
politics.  The  words  are  so  rigid,  so  easily  personified, 
so  associated  with  affection  and  prejudice;  the  things 
symbolized  by  the  words  are  so  unstable.  The  moralist 
or  the  teacher  deals,  as  a  Greek  would  say,  for  the  most 
part,  with  "natural,"  the  politician  always  with  "con- 
ventional" species.  If  one  forgets  the  meaning  of 
motherhood  or  childhood,  Nature  has  yet  made  for  us 
unmistakable  mothers  and  children  who  reappear,  true 

i  Amos,  ch.  v.,  vs.  21,  23,  24  (R.  V.  M.)  . 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  97 

to  type,  in  each  generation.  The  chemist  can  make 
sure  whether  he  is  using  a  word  in  precisely  the  same 
sense  as  his  predecessor  by  a  few  minutes'  work  in  his 
laboratory.  But  in  politics  the  thing  named  is  always 
changing,  may  indeed  disappear  and  may  require  hun- 
dreds of  years  to  restore.  Aristotle  defined  the  word 
"polity"  to  mean  a  state  where  "the  citizens  as  a  body 
govern  in  accordance  with  the  general  good."  *  As  he 
wrote,  self-government  in  those  States  from  which  he 
abstracted  the  idea  was  already  withering  beneath  the 
power  of  Macedonia.  Soon  there  were  no  such  States  at 
all,  and,  now  that  we  are  struggling  back  to  Aristotle's 
conception,  the  name  which  he  defined  is  borne  by  the 
"police"  of  Odessa.  It  is  no  mere  accident  of  philology 
that  makes  "Justices'  Justice"  a  paradox.  From  the 
time  that  the  Roman  jurisconsults  resumed  the  work  of 
the  Greek  philosophers,  and  by  laborious  question  and 
answer  built  up  the  conception  of  "natural  justice,"  it, 
like  all  other  political  conceptions,  was  exposed  to  the 
two  dangers.  On  the  one  hand,  since  the  original  effort 
of  abstraction  was  in  its  completeness  incommunicable, 
each  generation  of  users  of  the  word  subtly  changed  its 
use.  On  the  other  hand,  the  actions  and  institutions 
of  mankind,  from  which  the  conception  was  abstracted, 
were  as  subtly  changing.  Even  although  the  manu- 
scripts of  the  Roman  lawyers  survived,  Roman  law  and 
Roman  institutions  had  both  ceased  to  be.  When  the 
phrases  of  Justinian  were  used  by  a  Merovingian  king  or 

\    1  Politics,  Bk.  in.  ch.  vii. 


98         HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

a  Spanish  Inquisitor,  not  only  was  the  meaning  of  the 
words  changed,  hut  the  facts  to  which  the  words  could 
have  applied  in  their  old  sense  were  gone.  Yet  the  emo- 
tiona]  power  of  the  bare  words  remained.  The  civil  law 
and  canon  law  of  the  Middle  Ages  were  ahle  to  enforce 
all  kinds  of  almses  because  the  tradition  of  reverence 
still  attached  Itself  to  the  sound  of  "Rome."  For  hun- 
dreds of  years,  one  among  the  German  princes  was  made 
somewhat  more  powerful  than  his  neighbours  by  the 
fael  thai  lie  was  "Roman  Emperor,"  and  was  called  by 
the  name  of  Caesar. 

The  same  difficulties  and  uncertainties  as  those  which 
influence  the  history  of  a  political  entity  when  once 
formed  confront  ihe  statesman  who  is  engaged  in  making 
a  new  one.  The  great  men,  Stein,  Bismarck,  Cavour, 
or  Metternich,  who  throughout  the  nineteenth  century 
worked  ;ii  ihe  reconstruction  of  the  Europe  which 
Napoleon's  conquests  shattered,  had  to  build  up  new 

States  which  men  should  respecl  and  love,  whose  gov- 
ernments the)  should  willingly  obey,  and  for  whose 
continued  existence  they  should  be  prepared  to  die  in 
battle.  Races  and  Languages  and  religions  were  inter- 
mingled throughout  centra]  Europe,  and  the  historical 

memories  of  lite  kingdoms  and  dukedoms  and  bishop- 
rics   into    which    the    map    was    divided    were    confused 

and  unexciting.     Nothing  was  easier  than  to  produce 

and  distribute  new  (lags  and  coins  and  national  names. 
Hut   the  emotional  effect   of  such  things  depends  upon 

associations  which  require  time  to  produce,  and  which 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  99 


may  have  to  contend  against  associations  already 
existing.  The  hoy  in  Lomhardy  or  Galicia  saw  the 
soldiers  and  the  schoolmaster  salute  the  Austrian  flag, 
hut  the  real  thrill  came  when  he  heard  his  father  or 
mother  whisper  the  name  of  Italy  or  Poland.  Perhaps, 
as  in  the  case  of  Hanover,  the  old  associations  and  the 
new  are  for  many  years  almost  equally  balanced. 

In  such  times  men  fall  back  from  the  immediate 
emotional  association  of  the  national  name  and  search 
for  its  meaning.  They  ask  what  is  the  Austrian  or  the 
German  Empire.  As  long  as  there  was  only  one  Pope 
men  handed  on  unexamined  the  old  reverence  from 
father  to  son.  When  for  forty  years  there  had  been  two 
Popes,  at  Rome  and  at  Avignon,  men  began  to  ask  what 
constituted  a  Pope.  And  in  such  times  some  men  go 
further  still.  They  may  ask  not  only  what  is  the  mean- 
ing of  the  word  Austrian  Empire,  or  Pope,  but  what 
in  the  nature  of  things  is  the  ultimate  reason  why  the 
Austrian  Empire  or  the  Papacy  should  exist. 

The  work  therefore  of  nation-building  must  be  carried 
forward  on  each  plane.  The  national  name  and  flag 
and  anthem  and  coinage  all  have  their  entirely  non- 
logical  effect  based  on  habitual  association.  Mean- 
while the  statesmen  strive  to  create  as  much  meaning 
as  possible  for  such  symbols.  If  all  the  subjects  of  a 
State  serve  in  one  army  and  speak,  or  understand,  one 
language,  or  even  use  a  black-letter  alphabet  which 
has  been  abandoned  elsewhere,  the  national  name  will 
mean  more  to  them.     The  Saxon  or  the  Savoyard  will 


100       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

have  a  fuller  answer  to  give  himself  when  he  asks 
"What  does  it  mean,  that  I  am  a  German  or  a  French- 
man?" A  single  successful  war  waged  in  common  will 
create  not  only  a  common  history,  but  a  common  inherit- 
ance of  passionate  feeling.  "Nationalists,"  meanwhile, 
may  be  striving,  by  songs  and  pictures  and  appeals  to  the 
past,  to  revive  and  intensify  the  emotional  associations 
connected  with  older  national  areas — and  behind  all 
this  will  go  on  the  deliberate  philosophical  discussion  of 
the  advantages  to  be  derived  from  large  or  small,  racial 
or  regional  States,  which  will  reach  the  statesman  at 
second-hand  and  the  citizen  at  third-hand.  As  a 
result,  Italy,  Belgium,  and  the  German  Empire  succeed 
in  establishing  themselves-  as  States  resting1  upon  a 
sufficient  basis  of  patriotism,  and  Austria-Hungary  may, 
when  the  time  of  stress  comes,  be  found  to  have  failed. 
But  if  the  task  of  State  building  in  Europe  during 
the  nineteenth  century  was  difficult,  still  more  difficult 
is  the  task  before  the  English  statesman  of  the  twentieth 
century  of  creating  an  imperial  patriotism.  We  have 
not  even  a  name,  with  any  emotional  associations,  for 
the  United  Kingdom  itself.  No  Englishman  is  stirred 
by  the  name  "British,"  the  name  "English"  irritates  all 
Scotchmen,  and  the  Irish  are  irritated  by  both  alike. 
Our  national  anthem  is  a  peculiarly  flat  and  uninspiring 
specimen  of  eighteenth-century  opera  libretto  and  opera 
music.  The  little  naked  St.  George  on  the  gold  coins, 
or  the  armorial  pattern  on  the  silver  coins  never  inspired 
any  one.     The  new  copper  coinage  bears,  it  is  true,  a 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  101 


graceful  figure  of  Miss  Hicks  Beach.  But  we  have  made 
it  so  small  and  ladylike  that  it  has  none  of  the  emotional 
force  of  the  glorious  portrait  heads  of  France  or  Switzer- 
land. 

The  only  personification  of  his  nation  which  the 
artisan  of  Oldham  or  Middlesbrough  can  recognize  is 
the  picture  of  John  Bull  as  a  fat,  brutal,  early  nine- 
teenth-century Midland  farmer.  One  of  our  national 
symbols  alone,  the  "Union  Jack,"  though  it  is  as  destitute 
of  beauty  as  a  patchwork  quilt,  is  fairly  satisfactory. 
But  all  its  associations  so  far  are  with  naval  warfare. 

When  we  go  outside  the  United  Kingdom  we  are  in 
still  worse  case.  "The  United  Kingdom  of  Great  Britain 
and  Ireland  together  with  its  Colonies  and  Dependencies" 
has  no  shorter  or  more  inspiring  name.  Throughout  the 
Colonial  Conference  of  1907  statesman  and  leader  writ- 
ers tried  every  expedient  of  periphrasis  and  allusion  to 
avoid  hurting  any  one's  feelings  even  by  using  such  a 
term  as  "British  Empire."  To  the  Sydney  Bulletin,  and 
to  the  caricaturists  of  Europe,  the  fact  that  any  territory 
on  the  map  of  the  world  is  coloured  red  still  recalls 
nothing  but  the  little  greedy  eyes,  huge  mouth,  and 
gorilla  hands  of  "John  Bull." 

If,  again,  the  young  Boer  or  Hindoo  or  ex-American 
Canadian  asks  himself  what  is  the  meaning  of  member- 
ship ("citizenship,"  as  applied  to  five-sixths  of  the 
inhabitants  of  the  Empire,  would  be  misleading)  of  the 
Empire,  he  finds  it  extraordinarily  difficult  to  give  an 
answer.     When   he   goes   deeper   and    asks   for   what 


102       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

purpose  the  Empire  exists,  he  is  apt  to  be  told  that  the 
inhabitants  of  Great  Britain  conquered  half  the  world 
in  a  fit  of  absence  of  mind  and  have  not  yet  had  time  to 
think  out  an  ex  post  facto  justification  for  so  doing. 
The  only  product  of  memory  or  reflection  that  can  stir 
in  him  the  emotion  of  patriotism  is  the  statement  that  so 
far  the  tradition  of  the  Empire  has  been  to  encourage 
and  trust  to  political  freedom.  But  political  freedom, 
even  in  its  noblest  form,  is  a  negative  quality,  and  the 
word  is  apt  to  bear  different  meanings  in  Bengal  and 
Rhodesia  and  Australia. 

^  States,  however,  constitute  only  one  among  many 
types  of  political  entities.  As  soon  as  any  body  of  men 
have  been  grouped  under  a  common  political  name,  that 
name  may  acquire  emotional  associations  as  well  as 
an  intellectually  analysable  meaning.  For  the  conven- 
ience, for  instance,  of  local  government  the  suburbs 
of  Birmingham  are  divided  into  separate  boroughs. 
Partly  because  these  boroughs  occupy  the  site  of  ancient 
villages,  partly  because  football  teams  of  Scotch 
professionals  are  named  after  them,  partly  because 
human  emotions  must  have  something  to  attach  them- 
selves to,  they  are  said  to  be  developing  a  fierce  local 
patriotism,  and  West  Bromwich  is  said  to  hate  Aston  as 
the  Blues  hated  the  Greens  in  the  Byzantine  theatre. 
In  London,  largely  under  the  influence  of  the  Birming- 
ham instance,  twenty-nine  new  boroughs  were  created 
in  1899,  with  names — at  least  in  the  case  of  the  City  of 
Westminster — deliberately  selected  in  order  to  revive 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  103 


half-forgotten  emotional  associations.  However  in 
spite  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  prophecy  in  "The  Napoleon 
of  Notting  Hill,"  very  few  Londoners  have  learnt  to 
think  primarily  as  citizens  of  their  boroughs.  Town 
Halls  are  built  which  they  never  see,  coats  of  arms  are 
invented  which  they  would  not  recognize;  and  their 
boroughs  are  mere  electoral  wards  in  which  they  vote 
for  a  list  of  unknown  names  grouped  under  the  general 
title  adopted  by  their  political  party. 

The  party  is,  in  fact,  the  most  effective  political  entity 
in  the  modern  national  State.  It  has  come  into  existence 
with  the  appearance  of  representative  government  on  a 
large  scale;  its  development  has  been  unhampered  by 
legal  or  constitutional  traditions,  and  it  represents  the 
most  vigorous  attempt  which  has  been  made  to  adapt  the 
form  of  our  political  institutions  to  the  actual  facts  of 
human  nature.  In  a  modern  State  there  may  be  ten 
million  or  more  voters.  Every  one  of  them  has  equal 
right  to  come  forward  as  a  candidate  and  to  urge  either 
as  candidate  or  agitator  the  particular  views  which  he 
may  hold  on  any  possible  political  question.  But  to 
each  citizen,  living  as  he  does  in  the  infinite  stream  of 
things,  only  a  few  of  his  million  fellow-citizens  could 
exist  as  separate  objects  of  political  thought  or  feel- 
ing, even  if  each  one  of  them  held  only  one  opinion  on 
one  subject  without  change  during  his  life.  Something 
is  required  simpler  and  more  permanent,  something 
which  can  be  loved  and  trusted,  and  which  can  be  recog- 
nized at  successive  elections  as  being  the  same  thing  that 


104        HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 


was  loved  and  trusted  before;  and  a  party  is  such  a 
thing. 

The  origin  of  any  particular  party  may  be  due  to  a 
deliberate  intellectual  process.  It  may  be  formed,  as 
Burke  said,  by  "a  body  of  men  united  for  promoting  by 
their  joint  endeavours  the  national  interest  upon  some 
particular  principle  in  which  they  are  all  agreed."1 

But  when  a  party  has  once  come  into  existence  its 
fortunes  depend  upon  facts  of  human  nature  of 
which  deliberate  thought  is  only  one.  It  is  primarily  a 
name,  which,  like  other  names,  calls  up  when  it  is  heard 
or  seen  an  "image"  that  shades  imperceptibly  into  the 
voluntary  realization  of  its  meannig.  As  in  other  cases, 
emotional  reactions  can  be  set  up  by  the  name  and  its 
automatic  mental  associations.  It  is  the  business  of 
the  party  managers  to  secure  that  these  automatic 
associations  shall  be  as  clear  as  possible,  shall  be  shared 
by  as  large  a  number  as  possible,  and  shall  call  up  as 
many  and  as  strong  emotions  as  possible.  For  this 
purpose  nothing  is  more  generally  useful  than  the  party 
colour.  Our  distant  ancestors  must  have  been  able  to 
recognize  colour  before  they  recognized  language,  and 
the  simple  and  stronger  emotions  more  easily  attach 
themselves  to  a  colour  than  to  a  word.  The  poor  boy 
who  died  the  other  day  with  the  ribbon  of  the  Sheffield 
Wednesday  Football  Club  on  his  pillow  loved  the  colour 
itself  with  a  direct  and  intimate  affection. 

A  party  tune  is  equally  automatic  in  its  action,  and, 

1  Thoughts  on  the  Present  Discontents   (Macmillan,  1902),  p.  81. 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  105 


in  the  case  of  people  with  a  musical  "ear,"  even  more 
effective  than  a  party  colour  as  an  object  of  emotion. 
As  long  as  the  Marseillaise,  which  is  now  the  national 
tune  of  France,  was  the  party  tune  of  the  revolution 
its  influence  was  enormous.  Even  now,  outside  of 
France,  it  is  a  very  valuable  party  asset.  It  was  a  wise 
suggestion  which  an  experienced  political  organizer 
made  in  the  Westminster  Gazette  at  the  time  of  Glad- 
stone's death,  that  part  of  the  money  collected  in  his 
honour  should  be  spent  in  paying  for  the  composition  of 
the  best  possible  marching  tune,  which  should  be 
identified  for  all  time  with  the  Liberal  Party.1  One 
of  the  few  mistakes  made  by  the  very  able  men  who 
organised  Mr.  Chamberlain's  Tariff  Reform  Campaign 
was  their  failure  to  secure  even  a  tolerably  good  tune. 
Only  less  automatic  than  those  of  colour  or  tune 
are  the  emotional  associations  called  up  by  the  first 
and  simplest  meaning  of  the  word  or  words  used  for  the 
party  name.  A  Greek  father  called  his  baby  "Very 
Glorious"  or  "Good  in  Council,"  and  the  makers  of 
parties  in  the  same  way  chose  names  whose  primary 
meanings  possess  established  emotional  associations. 
From  the  beginning  of  the  existence  and  activity  of  a 
party  new  associations  are,  however,  being  created 
which  tend  to  take  the  place,  in  association,  of  the  origi- 
nal meaning  of  the  name.  No  one  in  America  when  he 
uses  the  terms  Republican  or  Democrat  thinks  of  their 
dictionary    meaning.     Any    one,    indeed,    who    did    so 

i  Westminster  Gazette,  June  11,  1898. 


106       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


would  have  acquired   a  mental  habit  as  useless   and 
as    annoying    as    the   habit   of   reading   Greek   history 
with  a  perpetual  recognition  of  the  original  meanings  of 
names    like    Aristobulus    and    Theocritus.     Long    and 
precise  names  which  make  definite  assertions  as  to  party 
policy  are  therefore  soon  shortened  into  meaningless 
syllables  with  new  associations  derived  from  the  actual 
history   of   the  party.     The   Constitutional  Democrats 
in  Russia  become  Cadets,  and  the  Independent  Labour 
Party  becomes  the  I.L.P.     On  the  other  hand,  the  less 
conscious  emotional   associations   which   are  automati- 
cally excited  by  less  precise  political  names  may  last 
much  longer.    The  German  National  Liberals  were  valu- 
able allies  for  Bismarck  during  a  whole  generation  be- 
cause their  name  vaguely  suggested  a  combination  of 
patriotism  and  freedom.     When  the  mine-owners  in  the 
Transvaal  decided  some  years  ago  to  form  a  political 
party  they  chose,  probably  after  considerable  discussion, 
the  name  of  "Progressive."     It  was  an  excellent  choice. 
In  South  Africa  the  original  associations  of  the  word 
were  apparently  soon  superseded,  but  elsewhere  it  long 
suggested  that  Sir  Percy  Fitzpatrick  and  his  party  had 
the  same  sort  of  democratic  sympathies  as  Mr.M'Kinnon 
Wood  and  his  followers  on  the  London  County  Council. 
No  one  speaking  to  an  audience  whose  critical  and 
logical    faculties    were    fully    aroused    would    indeed 
contend  that  because  a  certain  body  of  people  had  chosen 
to  call  themselves  Progressives,  therefore  a  vote  against 
them  was  necessarily  a  vote  against  progress.     But  in 


POLITICAL  ENTITIES  107 


the  dim  and  shadowy  region  of  emotional  association 
a  good  name,  if  its  associations  are  sufficiently  sub- 
conscious, has  a  real  political  value. 

Conversely,  the  opponents  of  a  party  attempt  to  label 
it  with  a  name  that  will  excite  feelings  of  opposition. 
The  old  party  terms  of  Whig  and  Tory  are  striking 
instances  of  such  names  given  by  opponents  and  lasting 
perhaps  half  a  century  before  they  lost  their  original 
abusive  associations.  More  modern  attempts  have  been 
less  successful,  because  they  have  been  more  precise. 
"Jingo"  had  some  of  the  vague  suggestiveness  of  an 
effectively  bad  name,  but  "Separatist,"  "Little  England- 
er,"  "Food  Taxer,"  remain  as  assertions  to  be  conscious- 
ly accepted  or  rejected. 

The  whole  relation  between  party  entities  and  political 
impulse  can  perhaps  be  best  illustrated  from  the  art  of 
advertisement.  In  advertisement  the  intellectual 
process  can  be  watched  apart  from  its  ethical 
implications,  and  advertisement  and  party  politics  are 
becoming  more  and  more  closely  assimilated  in  method. 
The  political  poster  is  placed  side  by  side  with  the  trade 
or  theatrical  poster  on  the  hoardings,  it  is  drawn  by  the 
same  artist,  and  follows  the  same  empirical  rules  of 
art.  Let  us  suppose,  therefore,  that  a  financier  thinks 
that  there  is  an  opening  for  a  large  advertising  campaign 
in  connection,  say,  with  the  tea  trade.  The  actual  tea- 
leaves  in  the  world  are  as  varied  and  unstable  as  the 
actual  political  opinions  of  mankind.  Every  leaf  in 
every  tea-garden  is  different  from  every  other  leaf,  and 


108       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


a  week  of  damp  weather  may  change  the  whole  stock 
in  any  warehouse.  What  therefore  should  the  adver- 
tiser do  to  create  a  commercial  "entity,"  a  "tea"  which 
men  can  think  and  feel  about?  A  hundred  years  ago  he 
would  have  made  a  number  of  optimistic  and  detailed 
statements  with  regard  to  his  opportunities  and  methods 
of  trade.  He  would  have  printed  in  the  newspapers  a 
statement  that  "William  Jones,  assisted  by  a  staff  of 
experienced  buyers,  will  attend  the  tea-sales  of  the  East 
India  Company,  and  will  lay  in  parcels  from  the  best 
Chinese  Gardens,  which  he  will  retail  to  his  customers 
at  a  profit  of  not  more  than  five  per  centum."  This,  how- 
ever, is  an  open  appeal  to  the  critical  intellect,  and  by 
the  critical  intellect  it  would  now  be  judged.  We  should 
not  consider  Mr.  Jones  to  be  an  unbiassed  witness  as  to 
the  excellence  of  his  choice,  or  think  that  he  would  have 
sufficient  motive  to  adhere  to  his  pledge  about  his  rate 
of  profit  if  he  thought  he  could  get  more. 

Nowadays,  therfore,  such  an  advertiser  would  prac- 
tise on  our  automatic  and  sub-conscious  associations. 
He  would  choose  some  term,  say  "Parramatta  Tea," 
which  would  produce  in  most  men  a  vague  suggestion 
of  the  tropical  East,  combined  with  the  sub-conscious 
memory  of  a  geography  lesson  on  Australia.  He  would 
then  proceed  to  create  in  connection  with  the  word  an 
automatic  picture-image  having  previous  emotional 
associations  of  its  own.  By  the  time  that  a  hund- 
red thousand  pounds  had  been  cleverly  spent,  no  one 
in  England  would  be  able  to  see  the  word  "Parramatta" 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  109 

on  a  parcel  without  a  vague  impulse  to  buy,  founded  on 
a  day-dream  recollection  of  his  grandmother,  or  of  the 
British  fleet,  or  of  a  pretty  young  English  matron,  or 
of  any  other  subject  that  the  advertiser  had  chosen  for 
its  associations  with  the  emotions  of  trust  or  affection. 
When  music  plays  a  larger  part  in  English  public 
education  it  may  be  possible  to  use  it  effectively  for 
advertisement,  and  a  "Parramatta  Motif"  would  in  that 
case  appear  in  all  the  pantomimes,  in  connection,  say, 
with  a  song  about  the  Soldier's  Return,  and  would  be 
squeaked  by  a  gramophone  in  every  grocer's  shop. 

This  instance  has  the  immense  advantage,  as  an  aid 
to  clearness  of  thought,  that  up  to  this  point  no  Par- 
ramatta Tea  exists,  and  no  one  has  even  settled  what 
sort  of  tea  shall  be  provided  under  that  name.  Par- 
ramatta tea  is  still  a  commercial  entity  pure  and  simple. 
It  may  later  on  be  decided  to  sell  very  poor  tea  at  a 
large  profit  until  the  original  associations  of  the  name 
have  been  gradually  superseded  by  the  association  of 
disappointment.  Or  it  may  be  decided  to  experiment 
by  selling  different  teas  under  that  name  in  different 
places,  and  to  push  the  sale  of  the  flavour  which  "takes 
on."  But  there  are  other  attractive  names  of  teas  on  the 
hoardings,  with  associations  of  babies,  and  bull-dogs, 
and  the  Tower  of  London.  If  it  is  desired  to  develop 
a  permanent  trade  in  competition  with  these  it  will  prob- 
ably be  found  wisest  to  supply  tea  of  a  fairly  uniform 
quality,  and  with  a  distinctive  flavour  which  may  act 
as  its  "meaning."     The  great  difficulty  will  then  come 


110       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

— — — i 

when  there  is  a  change  of  public  taste,  and  when  the 
sales  fall  off  because  the  chosen  flavour  no  longer 
pleases.  The  directors  may  think  it  safest  to  go  on 
selling  the  old  flavour  to  a  diminishing  number  of  cus- 
tomers, or  they  may  gradually  substitute  another  flavour, 
taking  the  risk  that  the  number  of  housewives  who 
say,  "This  is  not  the  real  Parramatta  Tea,"  may  be 
balanced  by  the  number  of  those  who  say,  "Parramatta 
Tea  has  improved."  If  people  will  not  buy  the  old 
flavour  at  all,  and  prefer  to  buy  the  new  flavour  under 
a  new  name,  the  Parramatta  Tea  Company  must  be  con- 
tent to  disappear,  like  a  religion  which  has  made  an 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  put  new  wine  into  old  bottles. 

All  these  conditions  are  as  familiar  to  the  party  poli- 
tician as  they  are  to  the  advertiser.  The  party  candi- 
date is,  at  his  first  appearance,  to  most  of  his  constitu- 
ents merely  a  packet  with  the  name  of  Liberal  or  Con- 
servative upon  it.  That  name  has  associations  of  colour 
and  music,  of  traditional  habit  and  affection,  which, 
when  once  formed,  exist  independently  of  the  party 
policy.  Unless  he  bears  the  party  label — unless  he  is, 
as  the  Americans  say,  a  "regular"  candidate — not  only 
will  those  habits  and  affections  be  cut  off  from  him,  but 
he  will  find  it  extraordinarily  difficult  to  present  himself 
as  a  tangible  entity  to  the  electors  at  all.  A  proportion 
of  the  electors,  varying  greatly  at  different  times  and 
at  different  places,  will  vote  for  the  "regular"  nominee 
of  their  party  without  reference  to  his  program, 
though  to  the  rest  of  them,  and  always  to  the  nominat- 


POLITICAL  ENTITIES  111 


ing  committee,  he  must  also  present  a  program  which 
can  be  identified  with  the  party  policy.  But,  in  any 
case,  as  long  as  he  is  a  party  candidate,  he  must  remem- 
ber that  it  is  in  that  character  that  he  speaks  and  acts. 
The  party  prepossessions  and  party  expectations  of  his 
constituents  alone  make  it  possible  for  them  to  think 
and  feel  with  him.  When  he  speaks  there  is  between 
him  and  his  audience  the  party  mask,  larger  and  less 
mobile  than  his  own  face,  like  the  mask  which  enabled 
actors  to  be  seen  and  heard  in  the  vast  open-air  theatres 
of  Greece.  If  he  can  no  longer  act  the  part  with 
sincerity  he  must  either  leave  the  stage  or  present  him- 
self in  the  mask  of  another  party. 

Party  leaders,  again,  have  always  to  remember  that 
the  organization  which  they  control  is  an  entity  with 
an  existence  in  the  memory  and  emotions  of  the 
electors,  independent  of  their  own  opinions  and  actions. 
This  does  not  mean  that  party  leaders  cannot  be  sincere. 
As  individuals  they  can  indeed  only  preserve  their 
political  life  by  being  in  constant  readiness  to  lose  it. 
Somtimes  they  must  even  risk  the  existence  of  their 
party  itself.  When  Sir  Robert  Peel  was  converted  to 
Free  Trade  in  1845,  he  had  to  decide  whether  he  and  his 
friends  should  shatter  the  Tory  Party  by  leaving  it,  or 
should  so  transform  its  policy  that  it  might  not  be  rec- 
ognized, even  in  the  half  conscious  logic  of  habit  and 
association,  as  that  entity  for  which  men  had  voted  and 
worked  four  years  before.  In  either  case  Peel  was 
doing  something  other  and  more  serious  than  the  expres- 


112       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


sion  of  his  individual  opinion  on  a  question  of  the 
moment.  And  yet,  if,  recognizing  this,  he  had  gone 
on  advocating  corn  duties  for  the  sake  of  his  party,  his 
whole  personal  force  as  a  politician,  and  therefore  even 
his  party  value,  would  have  been  lost. 

If  a  celestial  intelligence  were  now  to  look  down 
from  heaven  on  to  earth  with  the  power  of  observing 
every  fact  about  all  human  beings  at  once,  he  might 
ask,  as  the  newspaper  editors  are  asking  as  I  write, 
what  that  Socialism  is  which  influences  so  many  lives? 
He  might  answer  himself  with  a  definition  which  could 
be  clumsily  translated  as  "a  movement  towards  greater 
social  equality,  depending  for  its  force  upon  three  main 
factors,   the   growing  political   power   of   the   working 
classes,  the  growing  social  sympathy  of  many  members 
of  all  classes,   and  the  belief,   based  on  the  growing 
authority  of  scientific  method,  that  social  arrangements 
can  be  transformed  by  means  of  conscious  and  deliber- 
ate contrivance."     He  would  see  men  trying  to  forward 
this  movement  by  proposals  as  to  taxation,  wages,  and 
regulative  or  collective  administration;  some  of  which 
proposals  would  prove  to  be  successfully   adapted  to 
the  facts  of  human  existence,  and  some  would  in  the  end 
be  abandoned,  either  because  no  nation  could  be  per- 
suaded to  try  them,  or  because  when  tried  they  failed. 
But  he  would  also  see  that  this  definition  of  a  many- 
sided  and  ever- varying  movement  drawn  by  abstraction  I 
from  innumerable  socialistic  proposals  and  desires  is 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  113 

■ 

not  a  description  of  "Socialism"  as  it  exists  for  the 
greater  number  of  its  supporters.  The  need  of  some- 
thing which  one  may  love  and  for  which  one  may  work 
has  created  for  thousands  of  working  men  a  personified 
"Socialism,"  a  winged  goddess  with  stern  eyes  and 
drawn  sword,  to  be  the  hope  of  the  world  and  the  pro- 
tector of  those  that  suffer.  The  need  of  some  engine  of 
thought  which  one  may  use  with  absolute  faith  and  cer- 
tainty has  also  created  another  Socialism,  not  a  personifi- 
cation, but  a  final  and  authoritative  creed.  Such  a 
creed  appeared  in  England  in  1884,  and  William  Morris 
took  it  down  in  his  beautiful  handwriting  from  Mr. 
Hyndman's  lectures.  It  was  the  revelation  which  made 
a  little  dimly  educated  working  man  say  to  me  three 
years  later,  with  tears  of  genuine  humility  in  his  eyes, 
"How  strange  it  is  that  this  glorious  truth  has  been  hid- 
den from  all  the  clever  and  learned  men  of  the  world 
and  shown  to  me." 

Meanwhile  Socialism  is  always  a  word,  a  symbol 
used  in  common  speech  and  writing.  A  hundred  years 
hence  it  may  have  gone  the  way  of  its  predecessors — 
Leveller,  Saint-Simonism,  Communism,  Chartism — and 
may  survive  only  in  histories  of  a  movement  which  has 
since  undergone  other  transformation  and  borne  other 
names.  It  may,  on  the  other  hand,  remain,  as 
Republic  has  remained  in  France,  to  be  the  title  on 
coins  and  public  buildings  of  a  movement  which,  after 
many  disappointments  and  disillusionments,  has  suc- 
ceeded in  establishing  itself  as  a  government. 


114       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


But  the  use  of  a  word  in  common  speech  is  only  the 
resultant  of  its  use  by  individual  men  and  women,  and 
particularly  by  those  who  accept  it  as  a  party  name. 
Each  one  of  them,  as  long  as  the  movement  is  really 
alive,  will  find  that  while  the  word  must  be  used,  because 
otherwise  the  movement  will  have  no  political  existence, 
yet  its  use  creates  a  constant  series  of  difficult  problems  in 
conduct.  Any  one  who  applies  the  name  to  himself 
or  others  in  a  sense  so  markedly  different  from  common 
use  as  to  make  it  certain  or  probable  that  he  is  creat- 
ing a  false  impression  is  rightly  charged  with  want  of 
ordinary  veracity.  And  yet  there  are  cases  where  enor- 
mous practical  results  may  depend  upon  keeping  wide 
the  use  of  a  word  which  is  tending  to  be  narrowed.  The 
"Modernist"  Roman  Catholic  who  has  studied  the  history 
of  religion  uses  the  term  "Catholic  Church"  to  mean  a 
society  which  has  gone  through  various  intellectual 
stages  in  the  past,  and  which  depends  for  its  vitality 
upon  the  existence  of  reasonable  freedom  of  change  in 
the  future.  He  therefore  calls  himself  a  Catholic.  To 
the  Pope  and  his  advisers,  on  the  other  hand,  the  Church 
is  an  unchanging  miracle  based  on  an  unchanging  revela- 
tion. Father  Tyrrell,  when  he  says  that  he  "believes" 
in  the  Catholic  Church,  though  he  obviously  disbelieves 
in  the  actual  occurrence  of  most  of  the  facts  which  con- 
stitute the  original  revelation,  seems  to  them  to  be  simply 
a  liar,  who  is  stealing  their  name  for  his  own  fraudulent 
purposes.     They  can  no  more  understand  him  than  can 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  115 


the  Ultramontanes  among  the  German  Social-Democrats 
understand  Bernstein  and  his  Modernist  allies.  Bern- 
stein himself,  on  the  other  hand,  has  to  choose  whether 
he  ought  to  try  tojceep  open  the  common  use  of  the,  name 
Socialist,  or  whether  in  the  end  he  will  have  to  abandon 
it,  because  his  claim  to  use  it  merely  creates  bad  feeling 
and  confusion  of  thought. 

Sometimes  a  man  of  exceptional  personal  force  and 
power  of  expression  is,  so  to  speak,  a  party — a  political 
entity — in  himself.  He  may  fashion  a  permanent  and 
recognizable  mask  for  himself  as  "Honest  John"  or 
"The  Grand  Old  Man."  But  this  can  as  a  rule  only  be 
done  by  those  who  learn  the  main  condition  of  their 
task,  the  fact  that  if  an  individual  statesman's  intel- 
lectual career  is  to  exist  for  the  mass  of  the  present 
public  at  all,  it  must  be  based  either  on  an  obstinate 
adherence  to  unchanging  opinions  or  on  a  development, 
slow,  simple,  and  consistent.  The  indifferent  and  half- 
attentive  mind  which  most  men  turn  towards  politics 
is  like  a  very  slow  photograph  plate.  He  who  wishes 
to  be  clearly  photographed  must  stand  before  it  in  the 
same  attitude  for  a  long  time.  A  bird  that  flies  across 
the  plate  leaves  no  mark. 

"Change  of  opinion,"  wrote  Gladstone  in  1868,  "in 
those  to  whose  judgment  the  public  looks  more  or  less 
to  assist  its  own,  is  an  evil  to  the  country,  although  a 
much  smaller  evil  than  their  persistence  in  a  course 
which  they  know  to  be  wrong.     It  is  not  always  to  be 


116       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


blamed.  But  it  is  always  to  be  watched  with  vigil- 
lance;  always  to  be  challenged  and  put  upon  its  trial." 
Most  statesmen  avoid  this  choice  between  the  loss  of 
force  resulting  from  a  public  change  of  opinion,  and 
the  loss  of  character  resulting  from  the  public  persist- 
ence in  an  opinion  privately  abandoned,  not  only  by 
considering  carefully  every  change  in  their  own  con- 
clusions, but  by  a  delay,  which  often  seems  cowardly 
and  absurd,  in  the  public  expression  of  their  thoughts 
upon  all  questions  except  those  which  are  ripe  for  im- 
mediate action.  The  written  or  reported  word  remains, 
and  becomes  part  of  that  entity  outside  himself  which 
the  stateman  is  always  building  or  destroying  or  trans- 
forming. 

The  same  conditions  affect  other  political  entities 
besides  parties  and  statemen.  If  a  newspaper  is  to 
live  as  a  political  force  it  must  impress  itself  on  men's 
minds  as  holding  day  by  day  to  a  consistent  view.  The 
writers,  not  only  from  editorial  discipline,  but  from  the 
instinctive  desire  to  be  understood,  write  in  the  character 
of  their  paper'  personality.  If  it  is  sold  to  a  proprietor 
holding  or  w  ing  to  advocate  different  opinions,  it  must 
either  frankly  proclaim  itself  as  a  new  thing  or  must 
make  it  appear  by  slow  and  solemn  argumentative  steps 
that  the  new  attitude  is  a  necessary  development  of 
the  old.  It  is  therefore  rightly  felt  that  a  capitalist  who 
buys  a  paper  for  the  sake  of  using  its  old  influence  to 
strengthen  a  new  movement  is  doing  something  to  be 

1  Gleanings,  vol.  vii.  p.  100,  quoted  in  Morley's  Life,  vol.  i.  p.  211. 


POLITICAL   ENTITIES  117 


judged  by  other  moral  standards  than  those  which 
apply  to  the  purchase  of  so  much  printing-machinery 
and  paper.  He  may  be  destroying  something  which 
has  been  a  stable  and  intelligible  entity  for  thousands 
of  plain  people  living  in  an  otherwise  unintelligible 
world,  and  which  has  collected  round  it  affection  and 
trust  as  real  as  was  ever  inspired  by  an  orator  or  a 
monarch. 


CHAPTER    III 

NON-RATIONAL    INFERENCE 
IN    POLITICS 

The  assumption — which  is  so  closely  interwoven  with 
our  habits  of  political  and  economic  thought — that 
men  always  act  on  a  reasoned  opinion  as  to  their 
interests,  may  be  divided  into  two  separate  assumptions: 
first,  that  men  always  act  on  some  kind  of  inference  as 
to  the  best  means  of  reaching  a  preconceived  end,  and 
secondly,  that  all  inferences  are  of  the  same  kind,  and 
are  produced  by  a  uniform  process  of  "reasoning." 

In  the  two  preceding  chapters  I  dealt  with  the  first 
assumption,  and  attempted  to  show  that  it  is  important 
for  a  politician  to  realize  that  men  do  not  always  act 
on  inferences  as  to  means  and  ends.  I  argued  that 
men  often  act  in  politics  under  the  immediate  stimulus 
of  affection  and  instinct,  and  that  affection  and  instinct 
may  be  directed  towards  political  entities  which  are 
very  different  from  those  facts  in  the  world  around  us 
which  we  can  discover  by  deliberate  observation  and 
analysis. 

In  this  chapter  I  propose  to  consider  the  second 
assumption,  and  to  inquire  how  far  it  is  true  that  men, 
when  they  do  form  inferences  as  to  the  result  of  their 
political  actions,  always  form  them  by  a  process  of 
reasoning. 

118 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  119 


In  such  an  inquiry  one  meets  the  preliminary  dif- 
ficulty that  it  is  very  hard  to  arrive  at  a  clear  defini- 
tion of  reasoning.  Any  one  who  watches  the  working 
of  his  own  mind  will  find  that  it  is  by  no  means  easy 
to  trace  these  sharp  distinctions  between  various  mental 
states,  which  seem  so  obvious  when  they  are  set  out  in 
little  books  on  psychology.  The  mind  of  man  is  like 
a  harp,  all  of  whose  strings  throb  together;  so  that 
emotion,  impulse,  inference,  and  the  special  kind  of 
inference  called  reasoning,  are  often  simultaneous  and 
intermingled  aspects  of  a  single  mental  experience. 

This  is  especially  true  in  moments  of  action  and 
excitement;  but  when  we  are  sitting  in  passive  con- 
templation we  would  often  find  it  hard  to  say  whether 
our  successive  states  of  consciousness  are  best  described 
as  emotions  or  inferences.  And  when  our  thought 
clearly  belongs  to  the  type  of  inference  it  is  often  hard 
to  say  whether  its  steps  are  controlled  by  so  definite  a 
purpose  of  discovering  truth  that  we  are  entitled  to 
call  it  reasoning. 

Even  when  we  think  with  effort  and  with  a  definite 
purpose,  we  do  not  always  draw  inferences  or  form 
beliefs  of  any  kind.  If  we  forget  a  name  we  say  the 
alphabet  over  to  ourselves,  and  pause  at  each  letter  to 
see  if  the  name  we  want  will  be  suggested  to  us.  When 
we  receive  bad  news  we  strive  to  realize  it  by  allowing 
successive  mental  associations  to  arise  of  themselves,  and 
waiting  to  discover  what  the  news  will  mean  for  us.  A 
poet  broods  with  intense  creative  effort  on  the  images 


120       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


which  appear  in  his  mind,  and  arranges  them,  not  in 
order  to  discover  truth,  but  in  order  to  attain  an  artistic 
and  dramatic  end.  In  Prospero's  great  speech  in  ''The 
Tempest"  the  connection  between  the  successive  images 
— the  baseless  fabric  of  this  vision — the  cloud-capped 
towers — the  gorgeous  palaces — the  solemn  temples — 
the  great  globe  itself — is,  for  instance,  one  not  of  infer- 
ence but  of  reverie,  heightened  by  creative  effort,  and 
subordinated  to  poetic  intention. 

Most  of  the  actual  inferences  which  we  draw  during 
any  day  belong,  indeed,  to  a  much  humbler  type  of 
thought  than  do  some  of  the  higher  forms  of  non- 
inferential  association.  Many  of  our  inferences,  like 
the  quasi-instinctive  impulses  which  they  accompany 
and  modify,  take  place  when  we  are  making  no  con- 
scious effort  at  all.  In  such  a  purely  instinctive  action 
as  leaping  backwards  from  a  falling  stone,  the  impulse 
to  leap  and  the  inference  that  there  is  danger,  are 
simply  two  names  for  a  single  automatic  and  uncon- 
scious process.  We  can  speak  of  instinctive  inference 
as  well  as  of  instinctive  impulse;  we  draw,  for  instance, 
by  an  instinctive  mental  process,  inferences  as  to  the 
distance  and  solidity  of  objects  from  the  movements  of 
our  eye-muscles  in  focussing,  and  from  the  difference 
between  the  images  on  our  two  retinas.  We  are  unaware 
of  the  method  by  which  we  arrive  at  these  inferences, 
and  even  when  we  know  that  the  double  photograph 
in  the  stereoscope  is  flat,  or  that  the  conjurer  has  placed 
two  converging  sheets  of  looking-glass  beneath  his  table, 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  121 

we  can  only  say  that  the  photograph  "looks"  solid,  or 
that  we  "seem"  to  see  right  under  the  table. 

The  whole  process  of  inference,  rational  or  non- 
rational,  is  indeed  built  up  from  the  primary  fact  that 
one  mental  state  may  call  up  another,  either  because 
the  two  have  been  associated  together  in  the  history 
of  the  individual,  or  because  a  connection  between  the 
two  has  proved  useful  in  the  history  of  the  race.  If  a 
man  and  his  dog  stroll  together  down  the  street  they 
turn  to  the  right  hand  or  the  left,  hesitate  or  hurry  in 
crossing  the  road,  recognize  and  act  upon  the  bicycle 
bell  and  the  cabman's  shout,  by  using  the  same  process 
of  inference  to  guide  the  same  group  of  impulses. 
Their  inferences  are  for  the  most  part  effortless,  though 
sometimes  they  will  both  be  seen  to  pause  until  they 
have  settled  some  point  by  wordless  deliberation.  It 
is  only  when  a  decision  has  to  be  taken  affecting  the 
more  distant  purposes  of  his  life  that  the  man  enters 
on  a  region  of  definitely  rational  thought  where  the 
dog  cannot  follow  him,  in  which  he  uses  words,  and  is 
more  or  less  conscious  of  his  own  logical  methods. 

But  the  weakness  of  inference  by  automatic  associa- 
tion as  an  instrument  of  thought  consists  in  the  fact 
that  either  of  a  pair  of  associated  ideas  may  call  up  the 
other  without  reference  to  their  logical  connection. 
The  effect  calls  up  the  cause  as  freely  as  the  cause  calls 
up  the  effect.  A  patient  under  a  hypnotic  trance  is 
wonderfully  rapid  and  fertile  in  drawing  inferences, 
but  he  hunts  the  scent  backward  as  easily  as  he  does 


122       HUMAN   NATURE   1  N    POL!  PICS 


forward.     Put  a  i  in  bia  hand  and  he  believes 

that  he  has  committed  a  murder.  The  aig^il  of  an 
empty  plate  convincea  him  thai  he  baa  had  dinner.  If 
left  to  himself  he  will  probably  go  through   routine 

actions  well  enough.  But  any  one  who  understand! 
his  condition  can  make  liim  ad  absurdly. 

In  the  same  waj  when  we  dream  we  draw  absurd 
inferences  by  association.  The  feeling  of  discomfort 
due  to  slight  indigestion  produces  a  belief  mat  we  an 
ahout  to  speak  to  a  large  audience  and  have  mi-laid 
our  notes,  or  arc  walking  along  the  Brighton  Parade  in 
a  night-shirt.  Even  when  men  are  awake,  those  parta 
of  their  mind  i<>  which  for  the  moment  the)  are  not 
giving  full  attention  are  apt  t<>  draw  equally  unfounded 
inferences.  A  conjurer  who  succeeds  in  keeping  in- 
attention of  his  audience  concentrated  <>n  the  observa- 
tion of  what  he  is  doing  with  bia  right  hand  can  make 
them  draw  irrational  conclusions  from  the  movements 
of  his  left  hand.  People  in  a  state  of  strong  religious 
emotion  sometimes  become  conscious  of  a  throbbing 
sound  in  their  ears,  due  to  the  increased  force  of  their 
circulation.  An  organist,  by  opening  the  thirty-two 
foot  pipe,  can  create  the  same  sensation,  and  can  thereby 
induce  in  the  congregation  a  vague  and  half-conscious 
belief  that  they  are  experiencing  religious  emotion. 

The  political  importance  of  all  this  consists  in  the 
fact  that  most  of  the  political  opinions  of  most  men  are 
the  result,  not  of  reasoning  tested  by  experience,  but  of 
unconscious  or  half-conscious  inference  fixed  by  habit. 


\  ON-RATION  A  L   1  N  FERE  NCE  123 

It  i-  indeed  mainly  in  the  formation  of  tracks  of  thought 
that  iial.it  shows  it-  power  in  politics.  In  «>ur  other 
activities  habil  i-  largely  a  matter  of  musculai  adapta- 
tion, hut  the  bodirj  movements  <»t  politics  occur  so  -.-1- 
dom  that  nothing  like  a  habil  can  be  Bet  up  by  mem. 
On.-  m.i\  see  .i  respectable  voter,  whose  political  opinions 
have  been  smoothed  ami  polished  i>>  tin-  mental  habits 
of  mirrj  years,  fumbling  over  the  art  of  marking  and 
folding  hi-  ballot  paper  like  a  child  with  it-  first  copy- 
book, 

S  >me  men  even  seem  to  reverence  most  those  oi  their 
opinions  irhose  origin  has  least  to  do  with  deliberate 
reasoning.  When  Mr.  Barrie'fl  Bowie  Haggart  said: 
'i  am  .»t  opeenion  that  the  works  of  Burns  is  <>l  an 
immoral  tendency.  I  ha\r  not  read  them  myself,  but 
Buch  is  mv  opeenion,"  he  was  comparing  the  merely 
rational  conclusion  which  might  have  resulted  i rom  a 
reading  of  Burns's  works  with  the  conviction  about  them 
which  he  found  ready-made  in  hi-  mind,  ami  which 
was  thr  more  sacred  to  him  ami  more  intimately  bis 
own,  because  lie  «li<l  not  know  how  it  was  produced. 

Opinion  thus  onconsciously  formed  i-  a  fairly  safe 
guide  in  the  affairs  of  our  daily  life.  The  material 
world  'lor-  not  often  go  out  of  it-  way  to  deceive  us, 
ami  our  final  conviction-  are  the  resultant  of  many 
hundreds  of  independent  fleeting  inferences,  of  which 
the  valid  are  more  numerous  and  more  likely  to  survive 
than  the  fallacious.  But  even  in  our  personal  affairs 
1  Auld  Licht  lihlls,  p.  220. 


124       HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 


our  memory  is  apt  to  fade,  and  we  can  often  remember 
the  association  between  two  ideas,  while  forgetting  the 
cause  which  created  that  association.  We  discover  in 
our  mind  a  vague  impression  that  Simpson  is  a  drunk- 
ard, and  cannot  recollect  whether  we  ever  had  any  rea- 
son to  believe  it,  or  whether  some  one  once  told  us  that 
Simpson  had  a  cousin  who  invented  a  cure  for  drunk- 
enness. When  the  connection  is  remembered  in  a  tell- 
ing phrase,  and  when  its  origin  has  never  been  con- 
sciously noticed,  we  may  find  ourselves  with  a  really 
vivid  belief  for  which  we  could,  if  cross-examined,  give 
no  account  whatever.  When,  for  instance,  we  have 
heard  an  early-Victorian  bishop  called  "Soapy  Sam" 
half  a  dozen  times  we  get  a  firm  conviction  of  his 
character  without  further  evidence. 

Under  ordinary  circumstances  not  much  harm  is 
done  by  this  fact;  because  a  name  would  not  be  likely 
to  "catch  on"  unless  a  good  many  people  really  thought 
it  appropriate,  and  unless  it  "caught  on"  we  should  not 
be  likely  to  hear  it  more  than  once  or  twice.  But  in 
politics,  as  in  the  conjuring  trade,  it  is  often  worth  while 
for  some  people  to  take  a  great  deal  of  trouble  in  order 
to  produce  such  an  effect  without  waiting  for  the  idea  to 
enforce  itself  by  merely  accidental  repetition.  I  have 
already  said  that  political  parties  try  to  give  each  other 
bad  names  by  an  organized  system  of  mental  suggestion. 
If  the  word  "Wastrel,"  for  instance,  appears  on  the  con- 
tents bills  of  the  Daily  Mail  one  morning  as  a  name  for 
the  Progressives  during  a  County  Council  election,  a 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  125 

passenger  riding  on  an  omnibus  from  Putney  to  the 
Bank  will  see  it  half-consciously  at  least  a  hundred 
times,  and  will  have  formed  a  fairly  stable  mental 
association  by  the  end  of  the  journey.  If  he  reflected, 
he  would  know  that  only  one  person  has  once  decided 
to  use  the  word,  but  he  does  not  reflect,  and  the  effect 
on  him  is  the  same  as  if  a  hundred  persons  had  used 
it  independently  of  each  other.  The  contents-bills, 
indeed,  of  the  newspapers,  which  were  originally  short 
and  pithy  merely  from  consideration  of  space,  have 
developed  in  a  way  which  threatens  to  turn  our  streets 
(like  the  advertisement  pages  of  an  American  magazine) 
into  a  psychological  laboratory  for  the  unconscious 
production  of  permanent  associations.  "Another  Ger- 
man Insult,"  "Keir  Hardie's  Crime,"  "Balfour  Backs 
Down,"  are  intended  to  stick  and  do  stick  in  the  mind  as 
ready-made  opinions. 

In  all  this  again  the  same  rule  holds  as  in  the  pro- 
duction of  impulse.  Things  that  are  nearer  sense, 
nearer  to  our  more  ancient  evolutionary  past,  produce 
a  readier  inference  as  well  as  a  more  compelling  impulse. 
When  a  new  candidate  on  his  first  appearance  smiles 
at  his  constituents  exactly  as  if  he  were  an  old  friend, 
not  only  does  he  appeal,  as  I  said  in  an  earlier  chapter, 
to  an  ancient  and  immediate  instinct  of  human  affection, 
but  he  produces  at  the  same  time  a  shadowy  belief  that 
he  is  an  old  friend;  and  his  agent  may  even  imply  this, 
provided  that  he  says  nothing  definite  enough  to  arouse 
critical    and    rational    attention.     By   the    end    of   the 


126       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


meeting  one  can  safely  go  as  far  as  to  call  for  three  cheers 
for  "good  old  Jones."1 

Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton  some  years  ago  quoted  from  a 
magazine  article  on  American  elections  a  sentence  which 
said:  "A  little  sound  common-sense  often  goes  further 
with  an  audience  of  American  working  men  than  much 
high-flown  argument.  A  speaker  who,  as  he  brought 
forward  his  points,  hammered  nails  into  a  board,  won 
hundreds  of  votes  for  his  side  at  the  last  Presidential 
election."  x  The  "sound  common-sense"  consisted,  not, 
as  Mr.  Chesterton  pretended  to  believe,  in  the  presen- 
tation of  the  hammering  as  a  logical  argument,  but  in 
the  orator's  knowledge  of  the  way  in  which  force  is  given 
to  non-logical  inference  and  his  willingness  to  use  that 
knowledge. 

When  a  vivid  association  has  been  once  formed  it 
sinks  into  the  mass  of  our  mental  experience,  and  may 
then  undergo  developments  and  transformations  with 
which  deliberate  ratiocination  had  very  little  to  do.  I 
have  been  told  that  when  an  English  agitation  against 
the  importation  of  Chinese  contract  labour  into  South 
Africa  was  proposed,  an  important  personage  said  that 

1  Three-quarters  of  the  art  of  the  trained  salesman  depends  upon  his 
empirical  knowledge  of  this  group  of  psychological  facts.  A  small  girl 
of  my  acquaintance,  explaining  why  she  had  brought  back  from  her  first 
independent  shopping  expedition  a  photograph  frame  which  she  herself 
found  to  be  distressing,  said:  "The  shopman  seemed  to  suppose  I  had 
chosen  it,  and  so  I  paid  for  it  and  came  away."  But  her  explanation 
was  the  result  of  memory  and  reflection.  At  the  moment,  in  a  shadowy 
way  which  was  sufficient  for  the  shopman,  she  supposed  that  she  had 
chosen  it. 

1  Heretics,  p.  122. 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  127 

"there  was  not  a  vote  in  it."  But  the  agitation  was  set 
on  foot,  and  was  based  on  a  rational  argument  that  the 
conditions  enacted  by  the  Ordinance  amounted  to  a 
rather  cruel  kind  of  slavery  imposed  upon  unusually 
intelligent  Asiatics.  Any  one,  however,  who  saw  much 
of  politics  in  the  winter  of  1905-6  must  have  noticed 
that  the  pictures  of  Chinamen  on  the  hoardings 
aroused  among  very  many  of  the  voters  an  immediate 
hatred  of  the  Mongolian  racial  type.  This  hatred  was 
transferred  to  the  Conservative  party,  and  towards  the 
end  of  the  general  election  of  1906  a  picture  of  a  China- 
man thrown  suddenly  on  a  lantern  screen  before  a 
working-class  audience  would  have  aroused  an  instan- 
taneous howl  of  indignation  against  Mr.  Balfour. 

After  the  election,  however,  the  memory  of  the  Chinese 
faces  on  the  posters  tended  slowly  to  identify  itself, 
in  the  minds  of  the  Conservatives,  with  the  Liberals  who 
had  used  them.  I  had  at  the  general  election  worked 
in  a  constituency  in  which  many  such  posters  were 
displayed  by  my  side,  and  where  we  were  beaten.  A 
year  later  I  stood  for  the  London  County  Council  in  the 
same  constituency.  An  hour  before  the  close  of  the 
poll  I  saw,  with  the  unnatural  clearness  of  polling-day 
fatigue,  a  large  white  face  at  the  window  of  the  ward 
committee-room,  while  a  hoarse  voice  roared:  "Where's 
your  bloody  pigtail?  We  cut  it  off  last  time:  and  now 
we'll  put  it  round  your  bloody  neck  and  strangle  you." 

In  February  1907,  during  the  County  Council  election, 
there  appeared  on  the  London  hoardings  thousands  of 


128       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


posters  which  were  intended  to  create  a  belief  that  the 
Progressive  members  on  the  Council  made  their  personal 
livelihood  by  defrauding  the  rate-payers.  If  a  state- 
ment had  been  published  to  that  effect  it  would  have  been 
an  appeal  to  the  critical  intellect,  and  could  have  been 
met  by  argument,  or  in  the  law  courts.  But  the  appeal 
was  made  to  the  process  of  sub-conscious  inference. 
The  poster  consisted  of  a  picture  of  a  man  supposed  to 
represent  the  Progressive  Party,  pointing  a  foreshortened 
finger,  and  saying,  with  sufficient  ambiguity  to  escape 
the  law  of  libel:  "It's  your  money  we  want."  Its 
effectiveness  depended  on  its  exploitation  of  the  fact 
that  most  men  judge  of  the  truth  of  a  charge  of  fraud  by 
a  series  of  rapid  and  unconscious  inferences  from  the 
appearance  of  the  man  accused.  The  person  represented 
was,  if  judged  by  the  shape  of  his  hat,  the  fashion  of 
his  watch-chain  and  ring,  the  neglected  condition  of  his 
teeth,  and  the  redness  of  his  nose,  obviously  a  profes- 
sional sharper.  He  was,  I  believe,  drawn  by  an 
American  artist,  and  his  face  and  clothes  had  a  vaguely 
American  appearance,  which,  in  the  region  of  sub- 
conscious association,  further  suggested  to  most 
onlookers  the  idea  of  Tammany  Hall.  This  poster  was 
brilliantly  successful,  but,  now  that  the  election  is  over, 
it,  like  the  Chinese  pictures,  seems  likely  to  continue  a 
career  of  irrational  transference.  One  notices  that  one 
Progressive  evening  paper  uses  a  reduced  copy  of  it 
whenever  it  wishes  to  imply  that  the  Moderates  are  in- 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  129 

fluenced  by  improper  pecuniary  motives.  I  myself  find 
that  it  tends  to  associate  itself  in  my  mind  with  the 
energetic  politician  who  induced  the  railway  companies 
and  others  to  pay  for  it,  and  who,  for  all  I  know,  may 
in  his  own  personal  appearance  recall  the  best  traditions 
of  the  English  gentleman. 

Writers  on  the  "psychology  of  the  crowd"  have  pointed 
out  the  effect  of  excitement  and  numbers  in  substituting 
non-rational  for  rational  inference.  Any  cause,  how- 
ever, which  prevents  a  man  from  giving  full  attention 
to  his  mental  processes  may  produce  the  phenomena  of 
non-rational  inference  in  an  extreme  degree.  I  have 
often  watched  in  some  small  sub-committee  the  method 
by  which  either  of  the  two  men  with  a  real  genius  for 
committee  work  whom  I  know  could  control  his 
colleagues.  The  process  was  most  successful  towards 
the  end  of  an  afternoon,  when  the  members  were  tired, 
and  somewhat  dazed  with  the  effort  of  following  a  rapid 
talker  through  a  mass  of  unfamiliar  detail.  If  at  that 
point  the  operator  slightly  quickened  the  flow  of  his 
information,  and  slightly  emphasized  the  assumption 
that  he  was  being  thoroughly  understood,  he  could  put 
some  at  least  of  his  colleagues  into  a  sort  of  walking 
trance,  in  which  they  would  have  cheerfully  assented 
to  the  proposition  that  the  best  means  of  securing,  e.g., 
the  permanence  of  private  schools  was  a  large  and 
immediate  increase  in  the  number  of  public  schools. 
It  is  sometimes  argued  that  such  non-rational  infer- 


130       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


ences    are    merely    the    loose    fringe    of    our    political 
thinking,    and   that   responsible   decisions    in    politics, 
whether  they  are  right  or  wrong,  are  always  the  re- a  It 
of  conscious  ratiocination.     American  political  writers, 
for  instance,  of  the  traditional  intellectualist  type  are 
sometimes   faced   with   the   fact   that   the   delegates   to 
national  party  conventions,  when  they  select  candidates 
and    adopt    programs    for    Presidential    elections,    are 
not  in  a  condition  in  which  they  are  likely  to  examine 
the  logical  validity  of  their  own  mental  processes/    Such 
writers  fall  back  on  the  reflection  that  the  actual  choice 
of  President  is  decided  not  by  excited  conventions,  but 
by  voters  coming  straight  from  the  untroubled  sanctuary 
of  the  American  home. 

President  Garfield  illustrated  this  point  of  view  in  an 
often-quoted  passage  of  his  speech  to  the  Republican 
Convention  of  1880: — 

"I  have  seen  the  sea  lashed  into  fury  and  tossed  into 
spray,  and  its  grandeur  moves  the  soul  of  the  dullest 
man.  But  I  remember  that  it  is  not  the  billows,  but 
the  calm  level  of  the  sea  from  which  all  heights  and 
depths  are  measured.  .  .  .  Not  here,  in  this  brilliant 
circle  where  fifteen  thousand  men  and  women  are 
gathered,  is  the  destiny  of  the  Republic  to  be  decreed  for 
the  next  four  years  .  .  .  but  by  four  millions  of 
Republican  firesides,  where  the  thoughtful  voters,  with 
wives  and  children  about  them,  with  the  calm  thoughts 
inspired  by  love  of  home  and  country,  with  the  history  of 
the  past,  the  hopes  of  the  future,  and  knowledge  of  the 


NON-RATIONAL   INFERENCE  131 

great  men  who  have  adorned  and  blessed  our  nation  in 
days  gone  by.  There  God  prepare?  the  verdict  that 
shall  determine  the  wisdom  of  our  work  tonight." 

But  the  divine  oracle,  whether  in  America  or  in 
England,  turns  out,  too  often,  only  to  be  a  tired  house- 
holder, reading  the  headlines  and  personal  paragraphs 
of  his  party  newspaper,  and  half-consciously  forming 
mental  habits  of  mean  suspicion  or  national  arrogance. 
Sometimes,  indeed,  during  an  election,  one  feels  that  it 
is,  after  all,  in  big  meetings,  where  big  thoughts  can  be 
given  with  all  their  emotioned  force,  that  the  deeper 
things  of  politics  have  the  best  chance  of  recognition^ 

The  voter  as  he  reads  his  newspaper  may  adopt  by 
suggestion,  and  make  habitual  by  repetition,  not  only 
political  opinions  but  whole  trains  of  political  argument; 
and  he  does  not  necessarily  feel  the  need  of  comparing 
them  with  other  trains  of  argument  already  in  his  mind. 
A  lawyer  or  a  doctor  will  on  quite  general  principles 
argue  for  the  most  extreme  trade-unionism  in  his  own 
profession,  while  he  thoroughly  agrees  with  a  denun- 
ciation of  trade-unionism  addressed  to  him  as  a  railway 
shareholder  or  ratepayer.  The  same  audience  can 
sometimes  be  led  by  way  of  "parental  rights"  to  cheer 
for  denominational  religious  instruction,  and  by  way 
of  "religious  freedom"  to  hoot  it.  The  most  skilled 
political  observer  that  I  know,  speaking  of  an  organised 
newspaper  attack,  said,  "As  far  as  I  can  make  out  every 
argument  used  in  attack  and  in  defense  has  its  separate 

1Life  of  J.  A.  Garfield,  by  R.  H.  Conwell,  p.  328. 


132       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

and  independent  effect.  They  hardly  ever  meet,  even  if 
they  are  brought  to  bear  upon  the  same  mind."  From 
the  purely  tactical  point  of  view  there  is  therefore  much 
to  be  said  for  Lord  Lyndhurst's  maxim,  "Never  defend 
yourself  before  a  popular  assemblage  except  with  and 
by  retorting  the  attack;  the  hearers,  in  the  pleasure  which 
the  assault  gives  them,  will  forget  the  previous  charge."  1 

1  Morley's  Life  of  Gladstone,  vol.  i.  p.  122. 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE    MATERIAL     OF    POLITICAL 
REASONING 

But  man  is  fortunately  not  wholly  dependent  in  his 
political  thinking  upon  those  forms  of  inference  by 
immediate  association  which  come  so  easily  to  him,  and 
which  he  shares  with  the  higher  brutes.  The  whole 
progress  of  human  civilization  beyond  its  earliest  stages 
has  been  made  possible  by  the  invention  of  methods  of 
thought  which  enable  us  to  interpret  and  forecast  the 
working  of  nature  more  successfully  than  we  could  if  we 
merely  followed  the  line  of  least  resistance  in  the  use  of 
our  minds. 

These  methods,  however,  when  applied  in  politics, 
still  represent  a  difficult  and  uncertain  art  rather  than 
a  science  producing  its  effects  with  mechanical  accuracy. 

When  the  great  thinkers  of  Greece  laid  down  rules  for 
valid  reasoning,  they  had,  it  is  true,  the  needs  of  politics 
specially  in  their  minds.  After  the  prisoners  in  Plato's 
cave  of  illusion  should  be  unbound  by  true  philosophy 
it  was  to  the  service  of  the  State  that  they  were  to  devote 
themselves,  and  their  first  triumph  was  to  be  the  control 
of  passion  by  reason  in  the  sphere  of  government.  Yet 
if  Plato  could  visit  us  now,  he  would  learn  that  while 
our  glass-makers  proceed  by  rigorous  and  confident 
processes  to  exact  results,  our  statesmen,  like  the  glass- 

133 


134       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


makers  of  ancient  Athens,  still  trust  to  empirical 
maxims  and  personal  skill.  Why  is  it,  he  would  ask  us, 
that  valid  reasoning  has  proved  to  be  so  much  more 
difficult  in  politics  than  in  the  physical  sciences? 

Our  first  answer  might  be  found  in  the  character  of 
the  material  with  which  political  reasoning  has  to  deal. 
The  universe  which  presents  itself  to  our  reason  is  the 
same  as  that  which  presents  itself  to  our  feelings  and 
impulses — an  unending  stream  of  sensations  and 
memories,  every  one  of  which  is  different  from  every 
other,  and  before  which,  unless  we  can  select  and  rec- 
ognize and  simplify,  we  must  stand  helpless  and  unable 
either  to  act  or  think.  Man  has  therefore  to  create 
entities  that  shall  be  the  material  of  his  reasoning, 
just  as  he  creates  entities  to  be  the  object  of  his  emotions 
and  the  stimulus  of  his  instinctive  inferences. 

Exact  reasoning  requires  exact  comparison,  and  in 
the  desert  or  the  forest  there  were  few  things  which 
our  ancestors  could  compare  exactly.  The  heavenly 
bodies  seem,  indeed,  to  have  been  the  first  objects  of 
consciously  exact  reasoning,  because  they  were  so 
distant  that  nothing  could  be  known  of  them  except 
position  and  movement,  and  their  position  and  move- 
ment could  be  exactly  compared  from  night  to  night. 

In  the  same  way  the  foundation  of  the  terrestrial 
sciences  came  from  two  discoveries,  first,  that  it  was 
possible  to  abstract  single  qualities,  such  as  position 
and  movement,  in  all  things  however  unlike,  from 
the   other   qualities   of    those   things   and   to   compare 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  135 

them  exactly;  and  secondly,  that  it  was  possible 
artificially  to  create  actual  uniformities  for  the  purpose 
of  comparison,  to  make,  that  is  to  say,  out  of  unlike 
things,  things  so  like  that  valid  inferences  could  be 
drawn  as  to  their  behaviour  under  like  circumstances. 
Geometry,  for  instance,  came  into  the  service  of  man 
when  it  was  consciously  realized  that  all  units  of  land 
and  water  were  exactly  alike  in  so  far  as  they  were 
extended  surfaces.  Metallurgy,  on  the  other  hand, 
only  became  a  science  when  men  could  actually  take 
two  pieces  of  copper  ore,  unlike  in  shape  and  appear- 
ance and  chemical  constitution,  and  extract  from  them 
two  pieces  of  copper  so  nearly  alike  that  they  would 
give  the  same  results  when  treated  in  the  same  way. 

This  second  power  over  his  material  the  student  of 
politics  can  never  possess.  He  can  never  create  an 
artificial  uniformity  in  man.  He  cannot,  after  twenty 
generations  of  education  or  breeding  render  even  two 
human  beings  sufficiently  like  each  other  for  him  to 
prophesy  with  any  approach  to  certainty  that  they  will 
behave  alike  under  like  circumstances. 

How  far  has  he  the  first  power?  How  far  can  he 
abstract  from  the  facts  of  man's  state  qualities  in  respect 
of  which  men  are  sufficiently  comparable  to  allow  of 
valid  political  reasoning? 

On  April  5th,  1788,  a  year  before  the  taking  of  the 
Bastille,  John  Adams,  then  American  Ambassador  to 
England,  and  afterwards  President  of  the  United  States, 
wrote  to  a  friend  describing  the  "fermentation  upon  the 


136       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


subject  of  government"  throughout  Europe.  "Is  Gov- 
ernment a  science  or  not?"  he  describes  men  as  asking. 
"Are  there  any  principles  on  which  it  is  founded? 
What  are  its  ends?  If  indeed  there  is  no  rule,  no 
standard,  all  must  be  accident  and  chance.  If  there  is 
a  standard,  what  is  it?"  1 

Again  and  again  in  the  history  of  political  thought 
men  have  believed  themselves  to  have  found  this 
"standard,"  this  fact  about  man  which  should  bear 
the  same  relation  to  politics  which  the  fact  that  all 
things  can  be  weighed  bears  to  physics,  and  Ihe  fact 
that  all  things  can  be  measured  bears  to  geometry. 

Some  of  the  greatest  thinkers  of  the  past  have  looked 
for  it  in  the  final  causes  of  man's  existence.  Every 
man  differed,  it  is  true,  from  every  other  man,  but 
these  differences  all  seemed  related  to  a  type  of  perfect 
manhood  which,  though  few  men  approached,  and 
none  attained  it,  all  were  capable  of  conceiving.  May 
not,  asked  Plato,  this  type  be  the  pattern — the  "idea" — 
of  man  formed  by  God  and  laid  up  "in  a  heavenly 
place"?  If  so,  men  would  have  attained  to  a  valid 
science  of  politics  when  by  careful  reasoning  and  deep 
contemplation  they  had  come  to  know  that  pattern. 
Henceforward  all  the  fleeting  and  varying  things  of 
sense  would  be  seen  in  their  due  relation  to  the  eternal 
and  immutable  purposes  of  God. 

Or  thel  relation  of  man  to  God's  purpose  was  thought 
of  not  as  that  between  the  pattern  and  the  copy,  but 

1  Memoir  of  T.  Brand  Hollis,  by  J.  Disney,  p.  32. 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  137 

as  that  between  the  mind  of  a  legislator  as  expressed 
in  enacted  law,  and  the  individual  instance  to  which 
the  law  is  applied.  We  can,  thought  Locke,  by  reflect- 
ing on  the  moral  facts  of  the  world,  learn  God's  law. 
That  law  confers  on  us  certain  rights  which  we  can 
plead  in  the  Court  of  God,  and  from  which  a  valid 
political  science  can  be  deduced.  We  know  our  rights 
with  the  same  certainty  that  we  know  his  law. 

"Men,"  wrote  Locke,  "being  all  the  workmanship  of 
one  omnipotent  and  infinitely  wise  maker,  all  the 
servants  of  one  sovereign  master,  sent  into  the  world 
by  his  order  and  about  his  business;  they  are  his 
property  whose  workmanship  they  are,  made  to  last 
during  his,  not  one  another's,  pleasure:  and  being 
furnished  with  like  faculties,  sharing  all  in  one  com- 
munity of  nature,  there  cannot  be  supposed  any  such 
subordination  among  us  that  may  authorize  us  to  destroy 
another  as  if  we  were  made  for  one  another's  uses  as 
the  inferior  ranks  of  creatures  are  for  ours."  x 

When  the  leaders  of  the  American  revolution  sought 
for  certainty  in  their  argument  against  George  the  Third 
they  too  found  it  in  the  fact  that  men  "are  endowed  by 
their  Creator  with  certain  unalienable  rights." 

Rousseau  and  his  French  followers  rested  these  rights 
on  a  presumed  social  contract.  Human  rights  stood 
upon  that  contract  as  the  elephant  in  the  Indian  parable 
stood  upon  the  tortoise,  though  the  contract  itself,  like 
the  tortoise,  was  apt  to  stand  upon  nothing  at  all. 

1  Locke,   Second  Treatise  of  Government,   1690,  ed.   1821,  p.   191. 


138       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

At  this  point  Bentham,  backed  by  the  sense  of  hu- 
mour of  mankind,  swept  aside  the  whole  conception  of 
a  science  of  politics  deduced  from  natural  right. 
"What  sort  of  thing,"  he  asked,  "is  a  natural  right, 
and  where  does  the  maker  live,  particularly  in  Atheist's 
Town,  where  they  are  most  rife?"  1 

Bentham  himself  believed  that  he  had  found  the 
standard  in  the  fact  that  all  men  seek  pleasure  and 
avoid  pain.  In  that  respect  men  were  measurable 
and  comparable.  Politics  and  jurisprudence  could 
therefore  be  made  experimental  sciences  in  exactly 
the  same  sense  as  physics  or  chemistry.  "The  present 
work,"  wrote  Bentham,  "as  well  as  any  other  work  of 
mine  that  has  been  or  will  be  published  on  the  subject 
of  legislation  or  any  other  branch  of  moral  science,  is 
an  attempt  to  extend  the  experimental  method  of  reason- 
ing from  the  physical  branch  to  the  moral."  2 

Bentham's  standard  of  "pleasure  and  pain"  consti- 
tuted in  many  ways  an  important  advance  upon  "natural 
right."  It  was  in  the  first  place  founded  upon  a  univer- 
sally accepted  fact;  all  men  obviously  do  feel  both  pleas- 
ure and  pain.  That  fact  was  to  a  certain  extent  measur- 
able. One  could,  for  instance,  count  the  number  of 
persons  who  suffered  this  year  from  an  Indian  famine, 
and  compare  it  with  the\number  of  those  who  suffered 
last  year.     It  was  clear  also  that  some  pains  and  pleas- 

1  Escheat  vice  Taxation,  Bentham's  Works,  vol.  ii.  p.  598. 

2  MS,  in  University  College,  London,  quoted  by  Halevy,  La  Jeunesse  de 
Bentham,  pp.  289-290. 


MATERIAL   OF    REASONING  139 


ures  were  more  intense  than  others,  and  that  therefore 
the  same  man  could  in  a  given  number  of  seconds  experi- 
ence varying  amounts  of  pleasure  or  pain.  Above  all, 
the  standard  of  pleasure  and  pain  was  one  external  to 
the  political  thinker  himself.  John  Stuart  Mill  quotes 
Bentham  as  saying  of  all  philosophies  which  competed 
with  his  Utilitarianism:  "They  consist,  all  of  them,  in 
so  many  contrivances  for  avoiding  the  obligation  of 
appealing  to  any  external  standard,  and  for  prevailing 
upon  the  reader  to  accept  the  author's  sentiment  or 
opinion  as  a  reason  for  itself."  x 

A  "Benthamite,"  therefore,  whether  he  was  a  member 
of  Parliament  like  Grote  or  Molesworth,  or  an  official 
like  Chadwick,  or  an  organizing  politician  like  Francis 
Place,  could  always  check  his  own  feeling  about  "rights 
of  property,"  "mischievous  agitators,"  "spirit  of  the  Con- 
stitution," "insults  to  the  flag,"  and  so  on,  by  examining 
statistical  facts  as  to  the  numerical  proportion,  the 
income,  the  hours  of  work,  and  the  death  rate  from 
disease,  of  the  various  classes  and  races  who  inhabited 
the  British  Empire. 

But  as  a  complete  science  of  politics  Benthamism 
is  no  longer  possible.  Pleasure  and  pain  are  indeed 
facts  about  human  nature,  but  they  are  not  the  only 
facts  which  are  important  to  the  politician.  The 
Benthamites,  by  straining  the  meaning  of  words,  tried 
to  classify  such  motives  as  instinctive  impulse,  ancient 

1  Bentham's   Works,  vol  i.  p.  8.  quoted  in  Lytton's  England  and  the 
English    (1833),  p.  169.     This  passage  was  written  by  Mill,  cf.  preface. 


140       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


tradition,  habit,  or  personal  and  racial  idiosyncrasy  as 
being  forms  of  pleasure  and  pain.  But  they  failed; 
and  the  search  for  a  basis  of  valid  political  reasoning 
has  to  begin  again,  among  a  generation  more  conscious 
than  were  Bentham  and  his  disciples  of  the  complexity 
of  the  problem,  and  less  confident  of  absolute  success. 

In  that  search  one  thing  at  least  is  becoming  clear. 
We  must  aim  at  finding  as  many  relevant  and  measur- 
able facts  about  human  nature  as  possible,  and  we 
must  attempt  to  make  all  of  them  serviceable  in  political 
reasoning.  In  collecting,  that  is  to  say,  the  material 
for  a  political  science,  we  must  adopt  the  method  of  the 
biologist,  who  tries  to  discover  how  many  common 
qualities  can  be  observed  and  measured  in  a  group  of 
related  beings,  rather  than  that  of  the  physicist,  who 
constructs,  or  used  to  construct,  a  science  out  of  a  single 
quality  common  to  the  whole  material  world. 

The  facts  when  collected  must,  because  they  are 
many,  be  arranged.  I  believe  that  it  would  be  found 
convenient  by  the  political  student  to  arrange  them 
under  three  main  heads:  descriptive  facts  as  to  the 
human  type;  quantitative  facts  as  to  inherited  varia- 
tions from  that  type  observed  either  in  individuals 
or  groups  of  individuals;  and  facts,  both  quantitative 
and  descriptive,  as  to  the  environment  into  which  men 
are  born,  and  the  observed  effect  of  that  environment 
upon  their  political  actions  and  impulses. 

A  medical  student  already  attempts  to  master  as 
many  as  possible  of  those  facts  about  the  human  type 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  141 

—  i 

that  are  relevant  to  his  science.  The  descriptive  facts, 
for  instance,  of  typical  human  anatomy  alone  which  he 
has  to  learn  before  he  can  hope  to  pass  his  examina- 
tions must  number  many  thousands.  If  he  is  to  remem- 
ber them  so  that  he  can  use  them  in  practice,  they  must 
be  carefully  arranged  in  associated  groups.  He  may 
find,  for  instance,  that  he  remembers  the  anatomical 
facts  about  the  human  eye  most  easily  and  correctly 
by  associating  them  with  their  evolutionary  history, 
or  the  facts  about  the  bones  of  the  hand  by  associating 
them  with  the  visual  image  of  a  hand  in  an  X-ray 
photograph. 

The  quantitative  facts  as  to  variations  from  the 
anatomical  human  type  are  collected  for  him  in  statis- 
tical form,  and  he  makes  an  attempt  to  acquire  the  main 
facts  as  to  hygienic  environment  when  and  if  he  takes 
the  Diploma  of  Public  Health. 

The  student  teacher,  too,  during  his  period  of  train- 
ing acquires  a  series  of  facts  about  the  human  type, 
though  in  his  case  they  are  as  yet  far  less  numerous, 
less  accurate,  and  less  conveniently  arranged  than  those 
in  the  medical  text-books. 

If  the  student  of  politics  followed  such  an  arrange- 
ment, he  would  at  least  begin  his  course  by  mastering 
a  treatise  on  psychology,  containing  all  those  facts 
about  the  human  type  which  have  been  shown  by  experi- 
ence to  be  helpful  in  politics,  and  so  arranged  that  the 
student's  knowledge  could  be  most  easily  recalled  when 
wanted. 


142       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


At  present,  however,  the  politician  who  is  trained  for 
his  work  by  reading  the  best-known  treatises  on  political 
theory  is  still  in  the  condition  of  the  medical  student 
trained  by  the  study  of  Hippocrates  or  Galen.  He  is 
taught  a  few  isolated,  and  therefore  distorted,  facts  about 
the  human  type,  about  pleasure  and  pain,  perhaps,  and 
the  association  of  ideas,  or  the  influence  of  habit.  He  is 
told  that  these  are  selected  from  the  other  facts  of  human 
nature  in  order  that  he  may  think  clearly  on  the 
hypothesis  of  there  being  no  others.  What  the  others 
may  be  he  is  left  to  discover  for  himself;  but  he  is 
likely  to  assume  that  they  cannot  be  the  subject  of 
effective  scientific  thought.  He  learns  also  a  few  em- 
pirical maxims  about  liberty  and  caution  and  the  like, 
and,  after  he  has  read  a  little  of  the  history  of  institu- 
tions, his  political  education  is  complete.  It  is  no  won- 
der that  the  average  layman  prefers  old  politicians,  who 
have  forgotten  their  book-learning,  and  young  doctors 
who  remember  theirs.1 

A  political  thinker  so  trained  is  necessarily  apt  to 
preserve  the  conception  of  human  nature  which  he 
learnt  in  his  student  days  in  a  separate  and  sacred  com- 

1  In  the  winter  of  1907-8  I  happened,  on  different  occasions,  to  discuss 
the  method  of  approaching  political  science  with  two  young  Oxford  stu- 
dents. In  each  case  I  suggested  that  it  would  be  well  to  read  a  little 
psychology.  Each  afterwards  told  me  that  he  had  consulted  his  tutor, 
and  had  been  told  that  psychology  was  "useless"  or  "nonsense."  One 
tutor,  a  man  of  real  intellectual  distinction,  was  said  to  have  added  the 
curiously  scholastic  reason  that  psychology  was  "neither  science  nor 
philosophy." 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  143 

partment  of  his  mind,  into  which  the  facts  of  experience, 
however  laboriously  and  carefully  gathered,  are  not 
permitted  to  enter.  Professor  Ostrogorski  published, 
for  instance,  in  1902,  e.n  important  and  extraordinarily 
interesting  book  on  '"Democracy  and  the  Organization  of 
Political  Parties,"  containing  the  results  of  fifteen  years 
close  observation  of  the  party  system  in  America  and 
England.  The  instances  given  in  the  book  might  have 
been  used  as  the  basis  of  a  fairly  full  account  of  those 
facts  in  the  human  type  which  are  of  importance  to  the 
politician — the  nature  of  our  impulses,  the  necessary 
limitations  of  our  contact  with  the  external  world,  and 
the  methods  of  that  thinking  brain  which  was  evolved 
in  our  distant  past,  and  which  we  have  now  to  put  to 
such  new  and  strange  uses.  But  no  indication  was  given 
that  Professor  Ostrogorski'a  experience  had  altered  in  the 
least  degree  the  conception  of  human  nature  with  which 
he  started.  The  facts  observed  are  throughout  regret- 
fully contrasted  with  "free  reason,"  '  "the  general  idea 
of  liberty,"  2  "the  sentiments  which  inspired  the  men  of 
1848,"  3  and  the  book  ends  with  a  sketch  of  a  proposed 
constitution  in  which  the  voters  are  to  be  required  to  vote 
for  candidates  known  to  them  through  declarations  of 
policy  "from  which  all  mention  of  party  is  rigorously 
excluded."  One  seems  to  be  reading  a  series  of  con- 
scientious observations  of  the  Copernican  heavens  by  a 
loyal  but  saddened  believer  in  the  Ptolemaic  astronomy. 

i  Passim,  e.g.,  vol.  ii.  p.  728.  2  /&^  p    549 

3  Ibid,  p.  442.  4  Ibidt  p   756 


144       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


Professor  Ostrogorski  was  a  distinguished  member  of 
the  Constitutional  Democratic  Party  in  the  first  Duma 
of  Nicholas  II,  and  must  have  learnt  for  himself  that 
if  he  and  his  fellows  were  to  get  force  enough  behind 
them  to  contend  on  equal  terms  with  the  Russian  autoc- 
racy they  must  be  a  party,  trusted  and  obeyed  as  a 
party,  and  not  a  casual  collection  of  free  individuals. 
Some  day  the  history  of  the  first  Duma  will  be  written, 
and  we  shall  then  know  whether  Professor  Ostrogorski's 
experience  and  his  faith  were  at  last  fused  together  in 
the  heat  of  that  great  struggle. 

The  English  translation  of  Professor  Ostrogorski's 
book  is  prefaced  by  an  introduction  from  Mr.  James 
Bryce.  This  introduction  shows  that  even  in  the  mind 
of  the  author  of  "The  American  Constitution"  the  con- 
ception of  human  nature  which  he  learnt  at  Oxford  still 
dwells  apart. 

"In  the  ideal  democracy,"  says  Mr.  Bryce,  "every 
citizen  is  intelligent,  patriotic,  disinterested.  His  sole 
wish  is  to  discover  the  right  side  in  each  contested 
issue,  and  to  fix  upon  the  best  man  among  competing 
candidates.  His  common  sense,  aided  by  a  knowledge 
of  the  constitution  of  his  country,  enables  him  to  judge 
wisely  between  the  arguments  submitted  to  him,  while 
his  own  zeal  is  sufficient  to  carry  him  to  the  polling 
booth."  * 

A   few  lines   further  on   Mr.   Bryce   refers  to   "the 

1  Ostrogorski,  vol.  i.  p.  xliv. 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  145 


democratic  ideal  of  the  intelligent  independence  of  the 
individual  voter,  an  ideal  far  removed  from  the  actuali- 
ties of  any  State." 

What  does  Mr.  Bryce  mean  by  "ideal  democracy"? 
If  it  means  anything  it  means  the  best  form  of 
democracy  which  is  consistent  with  the  facts  of  human 
nature.  But  one  feels,  on  reading  the  whole  passage, 
that  Mr.  Bryce  means  by  those  words  the  kind  of 
democracy  which  might  be  possible  if  human  nature 
were  as  he  himself  would  like  it  to  be,  and  as  he  was 
taught  at  Oxford  to  think  that  it  was.  If  so,  the  pas- 
sage is  a  good  instance  of  the  effect  of  our  traditional 
course  of  study  in  politics.  No  doctor  would  now  begin 
a  medical  treatise  by  saying,  "the  ideal  man  requires 
no  food,  and  is  impervious  to  the  action  of  bacteria,  but 
this  ideal  is  far  removed  from  the  actualities  of  any 
known  population."  No  modern  treatise  on  pedagogy 
begins  with  the  statement  that  "the  ideal  boy  knows 
things  without  being  taught  them,  and  his  sole  wish  is 
the  advancement  of  science,  but  no  boys  at  all  like  this 
have  ever  existed." 

And  what,  in  a  world  where  causes  have  effects  and 
effects  causes,  does  "intelligent  independence"  mean? 

Mr.  Herman  Merivale,  successively  Professor  of 
Political  Economy  at  Oxford,  under-Secretary  for  the 
Colonies,  and  under-secretary  for  India,  wrote  in 
1861: 

"To  retain  or  to  abandon  a  dominion  is  not  an  issue 
which  will  ever  be  determined  on  the  mere  balance  of 


146       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

profit  and  loss;  or  on  the  more  refined  but  even  less 
powerful  motives  supplied  by  abstract  political  philoso- 
phy. The  sense  of  national  honour;  the  pride  of  blood, 
the  tenacious  spirit  of  self-defence,  the  sympathies  of 
kindred  communities,  the  instincts  of  a  dominant  race, 
the  vague  but  generous  desire  to  spread  our  civilization 
and  our  religion  over  the  world;  these  are  impulses 
which  the  student  in  his  closet  may  disregard,  but  the 
statesman  dares  not.   .  .  ."  1 

What  does  "abstract  political  philosophy"  here  mean? 
No  medical  writer  would  speak  of  an  "abstract" 
anatomical  science  in  which  men  have  no  livers,  nor 
would  he  add  that  though  the  student  in  his  closet  may 
disregard  the  existence  of  the  liver  the  working  physician 
dares  not. 

Apparently  Merivale  means  the  same  thing  by 
"abstract"  political  philosophy  that  Mr.  Bryce  means 
by  "ideal"  democracy.  Both  refer  to  a  conception  of 
human  nature  constructed  in  all  good  faith  by  certain 
eighteenth-century  philosophers,  which  is  now  no  longer 
exactly  believed  in,  but  which,  because  nothing  else  has 
taken  its  place,  still  exercises  a  kind  of  shadowy  author- 
ity in  a  hypothetical  universe. 

The  fact  that  this  or  that  writer  speaks  of  a  conception 
of  human  nature  in  which  he  is  ceasing  to  believe  as 
"abstract"  or  "ideal"  may  seem  to  be  of  merely  aca- 

1  Herman  Merivale,  Colonization,  1861,  2nd  edition.  The  Book  is  a  re- 
issue, largely  re-written,  of  lectures  given  at  Oxford  in  1837.  The  pas- 
sage quoted  forms  part  of  the  1861  additions,  p.  675. 


MATERIAL   OF    REASONING  117 


demic  interest.  But  such  half-beliefs  produce  immense 
tical  effects.  Because  Merivale  saw  that  the  politi- 
cal philosophy  which  his  teacher-  studied  in  their  closets 
was  inadequate,  and  because  he  had  nothing  to  sub- 
stitute for  it,  he  frankly  abandoned  any  attempt  at  valid 
thought  on  so  difficult  a  que-tion  a-  the  relation  of  the 
white  colonic-  to  the  rest  <>('  the  British  Empire.  He 
fore  decided  in  effect  that  it  ought  to  be  settled  by 
the  rule-of-thumb  method  of  "cutting  the  painter*';  and, 
Bince  he  was  the  chief  official  in  the  Colonial  Office  at  a 
critical  time,  hi-  decision,  whether  it  was  right  or  wrong, 
was  not  unimportant 

Mr.  Br\ee  fa  i-  been  perhaps  prevented  by  the  presence 
in  his  mind  of  BUch  a  half-belief  from  making  that  con- 
Btructive  contribution  to  general  political  science  for 
which  be  i-  better  equipped  than  any  other  man  of  his 
time.  "I  am  myself,"  he  says  in  the  same  Introduction, 
"an  optimist,  almost  a  professional  optimist,  as  indeed 
politic-  would  be  intolerable  were  not  a  man  grimly 
resolved  to  see  between  the  clouds  all  the  blue  sky  he 
can."  Imagine  an  acknowledged  leader  in  chemical 
research,  who,  finding  that  experiment  did  not  bear  out 
some  traditional  formula,  should  speak  of  himself  as 
nevertheless  "grimly  resolved"  to  see  things  from  the 
old  and  comfortable  point  of  view! 

The  next  step  in  the  course  of  political  training  which 
I  am  advocating  would  be  the  quantitative  study  of  the 
inherited  variations  of  individual  men  when  compared 

1  hoc.  cit.,  p.  xliii. 


148       HUMAN    NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

with  the  "normal"  or  "average"  man  who  has  so  far 
served  for  the  study  of  the  type. 

How  is  the  student  to  approach  this  part  of  the  course? 
Every  man  differs  quantitatively  from  every  other  man 
in  respect  of  every  one  of  his  qualities.  The  student 
obviously  cannot  carry  in  his  mind  or  use  for  the  pur- 
poses of  thought  all  the  variations  even  of  a  single 
inherited  quality  which  are  to  be  found  among  the  fif- 
teen hundred  millions  or  so  of  human  beings  who  at 
any  one  moment  are  in  existence.  Much  less  can  he 
ascertain  or  remember  the  inter-relation  of  thousands 
of  inherited  qualities  in  the  past  history  of  a  race  in 
which  individuals  are  at  every  moment  dying  and  being 
born. 

Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  faces  this  fact  in  that  extremely 
stimulating  essay  on  "Scepticism  of  the  Instrument," 
which  he  has  appended  to  his  "Modern  Utopia."  His 
answer  is  that  the  difficulty  is  "of  the  very  smallest 
importance  in  all  the  practical  affairs  of  life,  or  indeed 
in  relation  to  anything  but  philosophy  and  wide  gen- 
eralizations. But  in  philosophy  it  matters  profoundly. 
If  I  order  two  new-laid  eggs  for  breakfast,  up  come  two 
unhatched  but  still  unique  avian  individuals,  and  the 
chances  are  they  serve  my  rude  physiological  pur- 
pose." x 

To  the  politician,  however,  the  uniqueness  of  the 
individual  is  of  enormous  importance,  not  only  when 
he  is  dealing  with  "philosophy  and  wide  generaliza- 

1  A  Modern  Utopia,  p.  381. 


MATERIAL  OF   REASONING  149 

■  — - —  i 

tions"  but  in  the  practical  affairs  of  his  daily  activity. 
Even  the  fowl-breeder  does  not  simply  ask  for  "two 
eggs"  to  put  under  a  hen  when  he  is  trying  to  establish  a 
new  variety,  and  the  politician,  who  is  responsible  for 
actual  results  in  an  amazingly  complicated  world,  has  to 
deal  with  more  delicate  distinctions  than  the  breeder.  A 
statesman  who  wants  two  private  secretaries,  or  two  gen- 
erals, or  two  candidates  likely  to  receive  equally  en- 
thusiastic support  from  nonconformists  and  trade-union- 
ists, does  not  ask  for  "two  men." 

On  this  point,  however,  most  writers  on  political 
science  seem  to  suggest  that  after  they  have  described 
human  nature  as  if  all  men  were  in  all  respects  equal 
to  the  average  man,  and  have  warned  their  readers  of 
the  inexactness  of  their  description,  they  can  do  no  more. 
All  knowledge  of  individual  variations  must  be  left  to 
individual  experience. 

John  Stuart  Mill,  for  instance,  in  the  section  on  the 
Logic  of  the  Moral  Sciences  at  the  end  of  his  "System  of 
Logic,"  implies  this,  and  seems  also  to  imply  that  any 
resulting  in  exactness  in  the  political  judgments  and 
forecasts  made  by  students  and  professors  of  politics 
does  not  involve  a  large  element  of  error. 

"Excepting,"  he  says,  "the  degree  of  uncertainty, 
which  still  exists  as  to  the  extent  of  the  natural  differ- 
ences of  individual  minds,  and  the  physical  circum- 
stances on  which  these  may  be  dependent,  (considera- 
tions which  are  of  secondary  importance  when  we  are 
considering  mankind   in  the  average  or  en  masse),   I 


]50        HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

■  ■■  - 

believe  most  competent  judges  will  agree  that  the  gen- 
eral laws  of  the  different  constituent  elements  of  human 
nature  are  even  now  sufficiently  understood  to  render 
it  possible  for  a  competent  thinker  to  deduce  from  those 
laws,  with  a  considerable  approach  to  certainty,  the  par- 
ticular type  of  character  which  would  be  formed,  in 
mankind  generally,  by  any  assumed  set  of  circum- 
stances." * 

Few  people  nowadays  would  be  found  to  share  Mill's 
belief.  It  is  just  because  we  feel  ourselves  unable  to 
deduce  with  any  "approach  to  certainty"  the  effect  of 
circumstances  upon  character,  that  we  all  desire  to 
obtain,  if  it  is  possible,  a  more  exact  idea  of  human 
variation  than  can  be  arrived  at  by  thinking  of  mankind 
"in  the  average  or  en  masse." 

Fortunately  the  mathematical  students  of  biology, 
of  whom  Professor  Karl  Pearson  is  the  most  distin- 
guished leader,  are  already  showing  us  that  facts  of 
inherited  variation  can  be  so  arranged  that  we  can  re- 
member them  without  having  to  get  by  heart  millions 
of  isolated  instances.  Professor  Pearson  and  the  other 
writers  in  the  periodical  Biometrika  have  measured 
innumerable  beech  leaves,  snails'  tongues,  human  skulls, 
etc.,  etc.,  and  have  recorded  in  each  case  the  variations 
of  any  quality  in  a  related  group  of  individuals  by  that 
which  Professor  Pearson  calls  an  "observation  frequency 
polygon,"  but  which  I,  in  my  own  thinking,  find  that  I 
call  (from  a  vague  memory  of  its  shape)  a  "cocked  hat." 

1  System  of  Logic,  Book  vi.  vol.  ii.  (1875),  p.  462. 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING 


151 


Here  is  a  tracing  of  such  a  figure,  founded  on  the 
actual  measurement  of  25,878  recruits  for  the  United 
States  army. 


7i    74     73    72     71     70     63    &S    67     W    6^    64     63    62    £1 
/aches 

The  line  ABC  records,  by  it-  <li-tance  at  successive 
points  from  the  line  AC,  th<*  number  of  recruits  reach- 
ing successive  inches  of  height.  It  shows,  e.g.  (as 
indicated  by  the  dotted  lines)  that  the  number  of 
recruit-  between  5  ft  11.  in.  and  6  it.  was  about  1500, 
and  the  number  of  those  between  5  ft.  7  in.  and  5  ft. 
8  in.  about  4000.  * 

Such  figures,  when  they  simply  record  the  results  of 
the  fact  that  the  likeness  of  the  offspring  to  the  parent 
in  evolution  is  constantly  inexact,  are  (like  the  records 

1  This  figure  is  adapted  (by  the  kind  permission  of  the  publishers) 
from  <mc  »i\rn  in  PtofeMOl  K.  Pearson's  Chances  of  Death,  vol.  i.  p.  277. 
For  the  relation  between  such  records  of  actual  observation  and  the  curves 
resulting  from  mathematical  calculation  of  the  known  causes  of  variations, 
see  ibid.,  chap,  viii.,  the  paper  by  the  same  author  on  "Contributions 
to  the  Mathematical  Theory  of  Evolution,"  in  vol.  186  (a)  of  the 
Royal  Society's  Philosophical  Transactions  (1896),  and  the  chapters 
on  evolution   in  his  Grammar  of  Science,  2nd  edition. 


152       HUMAN    NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

of  other  cases  of  "chance"  variation)  fairly  symmetri- 
cal, the  greatest  number  of  instances  being  found  at  the 
mean,  and  the  descending  curves  of  those  above  and 
those  below  the  mean  corresponding  pretty  closely  with 
each  other.  Boot  manufacturers,  as  the  result  of  experi- 
ence, construct  in  effect  such  a  curve,  making  a  large 
number  of  boots  of  the  sizes. which  in  length  or  breadth 
are  near  the  mean,  and  a  symmetrically  diminishing 
number  of  the  sizes  above  and  below  it. 

In  the  next  chapter  I  shall  deal  with  the  use  in 
reasoning  of  such  curves,  either  actually  "plotted"  or 
roughly  imagined.  In  this  chapter  I  point  put,  firstly, 
that  they  can  be  easily  remembered  (partly  because 
our  visual  memory  ^is  extremely  retentive  of  the  image 
made  by  a  black  line  on  a  white  surface)  and  that  we 
can  in  consequence  carry  in  our  minds  the  quantitative 
facts  as  to  a  number  of  variations  enormously  beyond 
the  possibility  of  memory  if  they  were  treated  as 
isolated  instances;  and  secondly,  that  we  can  by  imagin- 
ing such  curves  form  a  roughly  accurate  idea  of  the 
character  of  the  variations  to  be  expected  as  to  any 
inherited  quality  among  groups  of  individuals  not  yet 
born  or  not  yet  measured. 

«  The  third  and  last  division  under  which  knowledge 
of  man  can  be  arranged  for  the  purposes  of  political 
study  consists  of  the  facts  of  man's  environment,  and 
of  the  effect  of  environment  upon  his  character  and 
actions.  The  extreme  instability  and  uncertainty  of 
this    element   constitutes   a    special   difficulty   of   poli- 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  153 


tics.  The  human  type  and  the  quantitative  distri- 
bution of  its  variations  are  for  the  politician,  who 
deals  with  a  few  generations  only,  practically  perman- 
ent. Man's  environment  changes  with  ever-increasing 
rapidity.  The  inherited  nature  of  every  human  being 
varies  indeed  from  that  of  every  other,  but  the  relative 
frequency  of  tin-  most  important  variations  can  be  fore- 
casted  for  each  generation.  The  difference,  on  the  other 
hand,  between  one  man's  environment  and  that  of  other 
men  can  be  arranged  on  no  curve  and  remembered  or 

forecasted  by  no  expedient  Buckle,  it  is  true,  attempted 
to  explain  the  present  and  prophesy  the  future  intellec- 
tual history  of  modern  nations  by  the  help  of  a  few 
generalizations  as  to  tfie  effect  of  thai  small  fraction 
of  their  environment  which  consisted  of  climate.  But 
Buckle  failed,  and  no  one  has  attacked  the  problem  again 
with  anything  like  his  confidence. 

We  can,  of  course,  see  that  in  the  environment  of 
any  nation  or  class  at  any  given  time  there  are  some 
facts  which  constitute  for  all  it-  members  a  common 
experience,  and  therefore  a  common  influence.  Climate 
is  such  a  fact,  or  the  discovery  of  America,  or  the 
invention  of  printing,  or  the  rates  of  wages  and  prices. 
All  nonconformists  are  influenced  by  their  memory  of 
certain  facts  of  which  very  few  churchmen  are  aware, 
and  all  Irishmen  by  facts  which  most  Englishmen  try 
to  forget.  The  student  of  politics  must  therefore  read 
history,  and  particularly  the  history  of  those  events 
and  habits  of  thought  in  the  immediate  past  which  are 


154      HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

likely  to  influence  the  generation  in  which  he  will 
work.  But  he  must  constantly  be  on  his  guard  against 
the  expectation  that  his  reading  will  give  him  much 
power  of  accurate  forecast.  Where  history  shows  him 
that  such  and  such  an  experiment  has  succeeded  or 
failed  he  must  always  attempt  to  ascertain  how  far 
success  or  failure  was  due  to  facts  of  the  human  type, 
which  he  may  assume  to  have  persisted  into  his  own 
time,  and  how  far  to  facts  of  environment.  When  he 
can  show  that  failure  was  due  to  the  ignoring  of  some 
fact  of  the  type,  and  can  state  definitely  what  that  fact 
is,  he  will  be  able  to  attach  a  real  meaning  to  the 
repeated  and  unheeded  maxims  by  which  the  elder 
members  of  any  generation  warn  the  younger  that  their 
ideas  are  "against  human  nature."  But  if  it  is  possible 
that  the  cause  was  one  of  mental  environment,  that  is 
to  say, .  of  habit  or  tradition  or  memory,  he  should  be 
constantly  on  his  guard  against  generalizations  about 
national  or  racial  "character." 

One  of  the  most  fertile  sources  of  error  in  modern 
political  thinking  consists,  indeed,  in  the  ascription  to 
collective  habit  of  that  comparative  permanence  which 
only  belongs  to  biological  inheritance.  A  whole  science 
can  be  based  upon  easy  generalizations  about  Celts  and 
Teutons,  or  about  East  and  West,  and  the  facts  from 
which  the  generalizations  are  drawn  may  all  disappear 
in  a  generation.  National  habits  used  to  change 
slowly  in  the  past,  because  new  methods  of  life  were 
seldom  invented  .and  only  gradually  introduced,  and 


MATERIAL   OF   REASONING  155 

use  tli«-  means  of  communicating  ideas  between 
man  and  man  or  nation  and  nation  were  extremely 
imperfect;  bo  that  a  true  statement  about  a  national 
habit  might,  and  probably  would,  remain  true  for 
centuries.  But  now  an  invention  which  may  produce 
profound  changes  in  social  01  industrial  life  is  as  likely 
to  be  taken  up  with  enthusiasm  in  some  country  on  the 
other.  Bide  of  tin-  globe  as  in  the  place  of  its  origin.  A 
statesman  who  has  anything  important  to  Baj  -ays  it 
to  an  audience  of  five  hundred  million-  next  morning, 
and  greal  events  like  the  Battle  of  1 1 1 « -  Sea  of  Japan 
begin  to  produce  their  effects  thousands  of  miles  off 
within  a  fen  hour-  of  their  happening.  Enough  lias 
already  occurred  under  these  new  conditions  to  show 
that  tlif  unchanging  East  may  tomorrow  enter  upon 
a  period  of  revolution,  and  that  Engliali  indifference  to 
ideas  or  French  military  ambition  are  habits  which, 
under  a  sufficiently  extended  stimulus,  nations  can 
-hake  oil  a-  completely  as  can  individual  men. 


CHAPTER   V 

THE    METHOD    OF    POLITICAL 
REASONING 

The  traditional  method  of  political  reasoning  has 
inevitably  shared  the  defects  of  its  subject-matter.  In 
thinking  about  politics  we  seldom  penetrate  behind  those 
simple  entities  which  form  themselves  so  easily  in  our 
minds,  or  approach  in  earnest  the  infinite  complexity 
of  the  actual  world.  Political  abstractions,  such  as 
Justice,  or  Liberty,  or  the  State,  stand  in  our  minds  as 
things  having  a  real  existence.  The  names  of  political 
species,  "governments"  or  "rights,"  or  "Irishmen,"  sug- 
gest to  us  the  idea  of  single  "type  specimens";  and  we 
tend,  like  mediaeval  naturalists,  to  assume  that  all  the 
individual  members  of  a  species  are  in  all  respects 
identical  with  the  type  specimen  and  with  each  other. 

In  politics  a  true  proposition  in  the  form  of  "All  A 
is  B"  almost  invariably  means  that  a  number  of  in- 
dividual persons  or  things  possess  the  quality  B  in 
degrees  of  variation  as  numerous  as  are  the  individuals 
themselves.  We  tend,  however,  under  the  influence  of 
our  words  and  the  mental  habits  associated  with  them 
to  think  of  A  either  as  a  single  individual  possessing 

the  qualitiy  B,  or  as  a  number  of  individuals  equally 

156 


METHODOFREASONING  157 


possessing  that  quality.  As  we  read  in  the  newspaper 
that  "the  educated  Bengalis  are  disaffected"  we  either 
see,  in  the  half-conscious  substratum  of  visual  images 
which  accompanies  our  reading,  a  single  Babu  with  a 
disaffected  expression  or  the  vague  suggestion  of  a  long 
row  of  identical  Babus  all  equally  disaffected. 

These  personifications  and  uniformities,  in  their 
turn,  tempt  us  to  employ  in  our  political  thinking  that 
method  of  a  priori  deduction  from  large  and  untried 
generalizations  against  which  natural  science  from  the 
days  of  Bacon  has  always  protested.  No  scientist  now 
argues  that  the  planets  move  in  circles,  because  planets 
are  perfect,  and  the  circle  is  a  perfect  figure,  or  that 
any  newly  discovered  plant  must  be  a  cure  for  some 
disease  because  nature  has  given  healing  properties  to 
all  plants.  But  "logical"  democrats  still  argue  in  Amer- 
ica that,  because  all  men  are  equal,  political  offices 
ought  to  go  by  rotation,  and  "logical"  collectivists  some- 
times argue  from  the  "principle"  that  the  State  should 
own  all  the  means  of  production  to  the  conclusion  that 
all  railway  managers  should  be  elected  by  universal 
suffrage. 

In  natural  science,  again,  the  conception  of  the  plu- 
rality and  interaction  of  causes  has  become  part  of  our 
habitual  mental  furniture;  but  in  politics  both  the  book- 
learned  student  and  the  man  in  the  street  may  be  heard 
to  talk  as  if  each  result  had  only  one  cause.  If  the 
question,  for  instance,  of  the  Anglo-Japanese  alliance 
is  raised,  any  two  politicians,  whether  they  are  tramps 


153       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

.  —  * 

on  the  outskirts  of  a  Hyde  Park  crowd  or  Heads  of 
Colleges  writing  to  the  Times,  are  not  unlikely  to  argue, 
one,  that  all  nations  are  suspicious,  and  that  therefore 
the  alliance  must  certainly  fail,  and  the  other  that  all 
nations  are  guided  by  their  interest,  and  that  therefore 
the  alliance  must  certainly  succeed.  The  landlord  of 
the  "Rainbow"  in  "Silas  Marner"  had  listened  to  many 
thousands  of  political  discussions  before  he  adopted  his 
formula,  "The  truth  lies  atween  you:  you're  both  right 
and  both  wrong,  as  I  allays  say." 

In  Economics  the  danger  of  treating  abstract  and 
uniform  words  as  if  they  were  equivalent  to  abstract 
and  uniform  things  has  now  been  recognized  for  the 
last  half  century.  When  this  recognition  began,  it  was 
objected  by  the  followers  of  the  "classical"  Political 
Economy  that  abstraction  was  a  necessary  condition 
of  thought,  and  that  all  dangers  arising  from  it  would 
be  avoided  if  we  saw  clearly  what  it  was  that  we  were 
doing.  Bagehot,  who  stood  at  the  meeting-point  of  the 
old  Economics  and  the  new,  wrote  about  1876: — 

"Political  Economy.  .  .is  an  abstract  science,  just  as 
statics  and  dynamics  are  deductive  sciences.  And  in 
consequence,  it  deals  with  an  unreal  and  imaginary 
subject, ..  .not  with  the  entire  real  man  as  we  know 
him  in  fact,  but  with  a  simpler  imaginary  man. .  .  . "  x 

He  goes  on  to  urge  that  the  real  and  complex  man  can 
be  depicted  by  printing  on  our  minds  a  succession  of 
different    imaginary    simple    men.     "The    maxim    of 

1  Economic  Studies  (Longmans,  1895),  p.  97. 


METHODOFREASONING  161 


How  far  is  a  similar  change  of  method  possible 
in  the  discussion  not  of  industrial  and  financial  proc- 
esses but  of  the  structure  and  working  of  political 
institutions? 

It  is  of  course  easy  to  pick  out  political  questions 
which  can  obviously  be  treated  by  quantitative  methods. 
One  may  take,  for  instance,  the  problem  of  the  best  size 
for  a  debating  hall,  to  be  used,  say,  by  the  Federal 
Deliberative  Assembly  of  the  British  Empire — assuming 
that  the  shape  is  already  settled.  The  main  elements 
of  the  problem  are  that  the  hall  should  be  large  enough 
to  accommodate  with  dignity  a  number  of  members 
sufficient  both  for  the  representation  of  interests  and 
the  carrying  out  of  committee  work,  and  not  too  large 
for  each  member  to  listen  without  strain  to  a  debate. 
The  resultant  size  will  represent  a  compromise  among 
these  elements,  accommodating  a  number  smaller  than 
would  be  desirable  if  the  need  of  representation  and 
dignity  alone  were  to  be  considered,  and  larger  than 
it  would  be  if  the  convenience  of  debate  alone  were 
considered. 

A  body  of  economists  could  agree  to  plot  out  or 
imagine  a  succession  of  "curves"  representing  the 
advantages  to  be  obtained  from  each  additional  unit  of 
size  in  dignity,  adequacy  of  representation,  supply  of 
members  for  committee  work,  healthiness,  etc.,  and  the 
disadvantage  of  each  additional  unit  of  size  as  affect- 
forces.  That  higher  and  more  difficult  task  must  wait  upon  the  slow 
growth  of  thorough  realistic  statistics." 


162       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


ing  convenience  of  debate,  etc.  The  curves  of  dignity 
and  adequacy  might  be  the  result  of  direct  estimation. 
The  curve  of  marginal  convenience  in  audibility  would 
be  founded  upon  actual  "polygons  of  variation"  record- 
ing measurements  of  the  distance  at  which  a  sufficient 
number  of  individuals  of  the  classes  and  ages  expected 
could  hear  and  make  themselves  heard  in  a  room  of 
that  shape.  The  economists  might  further,  after  dis- 
cussion, agree  on  the  relative  importance  of  each 
element  to  the  final  decision,  and  might  give  effect  to 
their  agreement  by  the  familiar  statistical  device  of 
"weighting." 

The  answer  would  perhaps  provide  fourteen  square 
feet  on  the  floor  in  a  room  twenty-six  feet  high  for 
each  of  three  hundred  and  seventeen  members.  There 
would,  when  the  answer  was  settled,  be  a  "marginal" 
man  in  point  of  hearing  (representing,  perhaps,  an 
average  healthy  man  of  seventy-four),  who  would  be 
unable  or  just  able  to  hear  the  "marginal"  man  in  point 
of  clearness  of  speech — who  might  represent  (on  a 
polygon  specially  drawn  up  by  the  Oxford  Professor 
of  Biology)  the  least  audible  but  two  of  the  tutors  at 
Balliol.  The  marginal  point  on  the  curve  of  the 
decreasing  utility  of  successive  increments  of  members 
from  the  point  of  view  of  committee  work  might  show, 
perhaps,  that  such  work  must  either  be  reduced  to  a 
point  far  below  that  which  is  usual  in  national  parlia- 
ments, or  must  be  done  very  largely  by  persons  not 
members  of  the  assembly  itself.     The  aesthetic  curve 


METHODOFREASONING  163 

of  dignity  might  be  cut  at  the  point  where  the  President 
of  the  Society  of  British  Architects  could  just  be  induced 
not  to  write  to  the  Times. 

Any  discussion  which  took  place  on  such  lines,  even 
although  the  curves  were  mere  forms  of  speech,  would 
be  real  and  practical.  Instead  of  one  man  reiterating 
that  the  Parliament  Hall  of  a  great  empire  ought  to 
represent  the  dignity  of  its  task,  and  another  man 
answering  that  a  debating  assembly  which  cannot  debate 
is  of  no  use,  both  would  be  forced  to  ask  "How  much 
dignity*"?  and  "How  much  debating  convenience"?  As 
it  is,  this  particular  question  seems  often  to  be  settled 
by  the  architect,  who  is  deeply  concerned  with  aesthetic 
effect,  and  not  at  all  concerned  with  debating  conven- 
ience. The  reasons  that  lie  gives  in  his  reports  seem 
convincing,  because  the  other  considerations  are  not 
in  the  minds  <>('  the  Building  Committee,  who  think  of 
one  element  only  of  the  problem  at  a  time,  and  make 
no  attempt  to  co-ordinate  all  the  elements.  Otherwise 
it  would  be  impossible  to  explain  the  fact  that  the  Debat- 
ing Hall,  for  instance,  of  the  House  of  Representatives 
at  Washington  is  no  more  fitted  for  debates  carried  on 
by  human  beings  than  would  a  spoon  ten  feet  broad  be 
fitted  for  the  eating  of  soup.  The  able  leaders  of  the 
National  Congress  movement  in  India  made  the  same 
mistake  in  1907,  when  they  arranged,  with  their  minds 
set  only  on  the  need  of  an  impressive  display,  that 
difficult  and  exciting  questions  of  tactics  should  be  dis- 
cussed by  about  fifteen  hundred  delegates  in  a  huge  tent, 


164       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


and  in  the  presence  of  a  crowd  of  nearly  ten  thousand 
spectators.  I  am  afraid  that  it  is  not  unlikely  that  the 
London  County  Council  may  also  despise  the  quantita- 
tive method  of  reasoning  on  such  questions,  and  may 
find  themselves  in  1912  provided  with  a  new  hall  admir- 
ably adapted  to  illustrate  the  dignity  of  London  and 
the  genius  of  their  architect,  but  unfitted  for  any  other 
purpose. 

Nor  is  the  essence  of  the  quantitative  method  changed 
when  the  answer  is  to  be  found,  not  in  one,  but  in 
several  "unknown  quantities."  Take,  for  instance,  the 
question  as  to  the  best  types  of  elementary  school  to  be 
provided  in  London.  If  it  were  assumed  that  only  one 
type  of  school  was  to  be  provided,  the  problem  would 
be  stated  in  the  same  form  as  that  of  the  size  of  the 
Debating  Hall.  But  it  is  possible  in  most  London 
districts  to  provide  within  easy  walking  distance  of 
every  child  four  or  five  schools  of  different  types,  and 
the  problem  becomes  that  of  so  choosing  a  limited 
number  of  types  as  to  secure  that  the  degree  of  "misfit" 
between  child  and  curriculum  shall  be  as  small  as  pos- 
sible. If  we  treat  the  general  aptitude  (or  "cleverness") 
of  the  children  as  differing  only  by  more  or  less,  the 
problem  becomes  one  of  fitting  the  types  of  school  to 
a  fairly  exactly  ascertainable  polygon  of  intellectual 
variation.  It  might  appear  then  that  the  best  results 
would  come  from  the  provision,  say,  of  five  types  of 
schools,  providing  respectively  for  the  2  per  cent,  of 


METHODOFREASONING  165 


greatest  natural  cleverness,  the  succeeding  10  per  cent., 
the  intermediate  76  per  cent.,  the  comparatively  sub- 
normal 10  per  cent.,  and  the  2  per  cent,  of  "mentally 
deficient."  That  is  to  say  the  local  authority  would  have 
to  provide  in  that  proportion  Secondary,  Higher  Grade, 
Ordinary,  Sub-Normal;  and  Mentally  Deficient  schools. 

A  general  improvement  in  nutrition  and  other  home 
circumstances  might  tend  to  "steepen"  the  polygon  of 
variation,  i.  «•.  to  bring  more  children  near  the  normal, 
or  it  might  increase  the  Dumber  of  children  with 
exceptional  inherited  cleverness  who  were  able  to  reveal 
that  fact,  and  bo  "flatten"  it;  and  cither  case  might  make 
a  change  desirable  in  the  best  proportion  between  the 
t\  pes  of  schools  or  even  in  the  number  of  the  types. 

It  would  be  more  difficult  to  induce  a  committee  of 
politicians  to  agree  on  the  plotting  of  curves,  represent- 
ing the  >ocial  advantage  to  be  obtained  by  the  succes- 
sive increment-  of  satisfaction  in  an  urban  industrial 
population  of  those  needs  which  are  indicated  by  the 
term-  Socialism  and  Individualism.  They  could,  how- 
ever, be  brought  to  admit  that  the  discovery  of  curves 
for  thai  purpose  is  a  matter  of  observation  and  inquiry, 
and  that  the  best  possible  distribution  of  social  duties 
between  the  individual  and  the  state  would  cut  both 
at  some  point  or  other.  For  many  Socialists  and 
Individualist-  the  mere  attempt  to  think  in  such  a  way 
of  their  problem  would  be  an  extremely  valuable  exer- 
cise.    If  a  Socialist  and  an  Individualist  were  required 


166       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


even  to  ask  themselves  the  question,  "How  much  Social- 
ism?" or  "How  much  Individualism?"  a  basis  of  real 
discussion  would  be  arrived  at — even  in  the  impossible 
case  that  one  should  answer,  "All  Individualism  and 
no  Socialism,"  and  the  other,  "All  Socialism  and  no 
Individualism." 

The  fact,  of  course,  that  each  step  towards  either 
Socialism  or  Individualism  changes  the  character  of 
the  other  elements  in  the  problem,  or  the  fact  that 
an  invention  like  printing,  or  representative  govern- 
ment, or  Civil  Service  examinations,  or  the  Utilitarian 
philosophy,  may  make  it  possible  to  provide  greatly 
increased  satisfaction  both  to  Socialist  and  Individualist 
desires,  complicates  the  question,  but  does  not  alter 
its  quantitative  character.  The  essential  point  is  that 
in  every  case  in  which  a  political  thinker  is  able  to 
adopt  what  Professor  Marshall  calls  the  quantitative 
method  of  reasoning,  his  vocabulary  and  method, 
instead  of  constantly  suggesting  a  false  simplicity,  warn 
him  that  every  individual  instance  with  which  he  deals 
is  different  from  any  other,  that  any  effect  is  a  func- 
tion of  many  variable  causes,  and,  therefore,  that  no 
estimate  of  the  result  of  any  act  can  be  accurate  unless 
all  its  conditions  and  their  relative  importance  are  taken 
into  account. 

But  how  far  are  such  quantitative  methods  possible 
when  a  statesman  is  dealing,  neither  with  an  obviously 
quantitative  problem,  like  the  building  of  halls  or 
schools,  nor  with  an  attempt  to  give  quantitative  mean- 


M  E  T  H  0  D  0  F  R  E  A  S  0  N  I  N  G  167 

■ ~~ — : — : — ■ 

ing  to  abstract  terms  like  Socialism  or  Individualism, 
but  with  the  enormous  complexity  of  responsible  leg- 
islation? 

In  approaching  this  question  we  shall  be  helped  if 
we  keep  before  us  a  description  of  the  way  in  which 
some  one  statesman  has,  in  fact,  thought  of  a  great 
constitutional  problem. 

Take,  for  instance,  the  indications  which  Mr.  Morley 
gives  of  the  thinking  done  by  Gladstone  on  Home  Rule 
during  the  autumn  and  winter  of  1885-86.  Gladstone, 
we  arr  told,  had  already,  for  many  years  past,  pondered 
anxiously  at  intervals  about  Ireland,  and  now  he  de- 
scribes  himself  as  "thinking  incessantly  about  the  mat- 
ter" (vol.  iii.  p.  264  ).  and  "preparing  myself  by  study 
and  reflection"  ( p.  27.'i ). 

He  has  fir>t  to  consider  the  state  of  feeling  in  Eng- 
land and  Ireland,  and  to  calculate  to  what  extent  and 
umler  what  influences  it  may  be  expected  to  change. 
As  to  English  feeling,  "what  I  expect,"  he  says,  "is  a 
healthy  slow  fermentation  in  many  minds  working 
toward-  the  final  product""  (p.  261  I.  The  [rish  desire 
for  self-government,  on  the  other  hand,  will  not  change, 
and  mu-t  be  taken,  within  the  time-limit  of  his  problem, 
as  "fixed"  (  p.  240) .  In  both  England  and  Ireland,  how- 
ever, he  believes  that  "mutual  attachment"  may  grow 
(p.  292). 

Before  making  up  his  mind  in  favour  of  some  kind 
of  Home  Rule,  he  examines  every  thinkable  alterna- 
tive, especially  the  development  of  Irish  County  Gov- 


168       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


ernment,  or  a  Federal  arrangement  in  which  all  three  of 
the  united  kingdoms  would  be  concerned.  Here  and 
there  he  finds  suggestions  in  the  history  of  Austria- 
Hungary,  of  Norway  and  Sweden,  or  of  the  "colonial 
type"  of  government.  Nearly  every  day  he  reads  Burke, 
and  exclaims  "what  a  magazine  of  wisdom  on  Ireland 
and  America"  (p.  280).  He  gets  much  help  from  "a 
chapter  on  semi-sovereign  assemblies  in  Dicey's  "Law  of 
the  Constitution"  (p.  280).  He  tries  to  see  the  question 
from  fresh  points  of  view  in  intimate  personal  discus- 
sions, and  by  imagining  what  "the  civilized  world" 
(p.  225)  will  think.  As  he  gets  nearer  to  his  subject, 
he  has  definite  statistical  reports  made  for  him  by 
"Welby  and  Hamilton  on  the  figures"  (p.  306),  has  "stiff 
conclaves  about  finance  and  land"  (p.  298),  and  nearly 
comes  to  a  final  split  with  Parnell  on  the  question 
whether  the  Irish  contribution  to  Imperial  taxation  shall 
be  a  fifteenth  or  a  twentieth. 

Time  and  persons  are  important  factors  in  his  cal- 
culation. If  Lord  Salisbury  will  consent  to  introduce 
some  measure  of  Irish  self-government,  the  problem 
will  be  fundamentally  altered,  and  the  same  will  hap- 
pen if  the  general  election  produces  a  Liberal  majority 
independent  of  both  Irish  and  Conservatives;  and  Mr. 
Morley  describes  as  underlying  all  his  calculations  "the 
irresistible  attraction  for  him  of  all  the  grand  and 
eternal  commonplaces  of  liberty  and  self-government" 
(p.  260). 

It  is  not  likely  that  Mr.  Morley's  narrative  touches 


M  E  T  H  O  D  0  F  R  E  A  S  0  N  I  N  G  169 

on  more  than  a  fraction  of  the  questions  which  must 
have  been  in  Gladstone's  mind  during  these  months 
of  incessant  thought.  No  mention  is  made,  for  instance, 
of  religion,  or  of  the  military  position,  or  of  the  per- 
manent possibility  of  enforcing  the  proposed  restric- 
tions on  self-government.  But  enough  is  given  to  show 
the  complexity  of  political  thought  at  that  stage  when 
a  statesman,  -till  uncommitted,  is  considering  what  will 
be  the  effect  of  a  new  political  departure. 

What  thru  was  the  logical  process  by  which  Glad- 
stone's final  division  was  arrived  at? 

Did  he  for  instance  deal  frith  a  succession  of  simple 
problems  or  with  one  complex  problem?  It  is,  I  think, 
dear  tliat  from  time  to  time  isolated  and  comparatively 
Bimple  train-  of  reasoning  were  followed  up;  but  it  is 
also  clear  that  Gladstone's  main  effort  of  thought  was 
involved  in  the  process  of  co-ordinating  all  the  labori- 
ously collected  contents  of  his  mind  onto  the  whole 
problem.  This  is  emphasized  by  a  quotation  in  which 
Mr.  Morley,  who  was  closely  associated  with  Gladstone's 
intellectual  toil  during  this  period,  indicates  his  own 
recollection. 

"Historians,"  he  quotes  from  Professor  Gardiner, 
"coolly  dissect  a  man's  thoughts  as  they  please;  and 
label  them  like  specimens  in  a  naturalist's  cabinet. 
Such  a  thing,  they  argue,  was  done  for  mere  personal 
aggrandizement;  such  a  thing  for  national  objects,  such 
a  thing  from  high  religious  motives.  In  real  life  we 
may  be  sure  it  was  not  so"  (p.  277). 


170       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


And  it  is  clear  that  in  spite  of  the  ease  and  delight 
with  which  Gladstone's  mind  moved  among  "the  eternal 
commonplaces  of  liberty  and  self-government,"  he  is 
seeking  throughout  for  a  quantitative  solution.  "Home 
Rule"  is  no  simple  entity  for  him.  He  realizes  that  the 
number  of  possible  schemes  for  Irish  government  is 
infinite,  and  he  attempts  to  make  at  every  point  in  his 
own  scheme  a  delicate  adjustment  between  many  varying 

forces. 

A  large  part  of  this  work  of  complex  co-ordination 
was  apparently  in  Mr.   Gladstone's  case  unconscious. 
Throughout  the  chapters  one  has   the   feeling — which 
any  one  who  has  had  to  make  less  important  political 
decisions  can  parallel  from  his  own  experience — that 
Gladstone  was  waiting  for  indications  of  a  solution  to 
appear  in  his  mind.     He  was  conscious  of  his  effort, 
conscious  also  that  his  effort  was  being  directed  sim- 
ultaneously towards  many  different  considerations,  but 
largely  unconscious  of  the  actual  process  of  inference, 
which  went  on  perhaps  more  rapidly  when  he  was  asleep, 
or  thinking  of  something  else,  than  when  he  was  awake 
and  attentive.     A  phrase  of  Mr.  Morley's  indicates  a 
feeling  with  which  every  politician  is  familiar.     "The 
reader,"  he  says,  "knows  in  what  direction  the  main  cur- 
rent of  Mr.  Gladstone's  thought  must  have  been  setting" 
(p.  236). 

That  is  to  say,  we  are  watching  an  operation  rather 
of  art  than  of  science,  of  long  experience  and  trained 
faculty  rather  than  of  conscious  method. 


MKTHODOFREASOMNG  171 


But  the  history  of  human  progress  consists  in  the 
gradual  and  partial  substitution  of  science  for  art,  of  the 
power  over  nature  acquired  in  youth  by  study,  for  that 
which  comes  in  late  middle  age  as  the  half-conscious 
result  of  experience.  Our  problem  therefore  involves 
the  further  question,  whether  those  forms  of  political 
thought  which  correspond  to  the  complexity  of  nature 
are  teachable  or  not?  At  present  they  are  not  often 
taught.  In  every  generation  thousands  of  young  men 
and  women  are  attracted  to  politics  because  their  intel- 
lects are  keener,  and  their  sympathies  wider  than  those 
of  their  fellows.  The)  become  followers  of  Liberalism 
or  Imperialism,  of  Scientific  Socialism  or  the  Mights  of 
Men  or  Women.  To  them,  at  first,  Liberalism  and  the 
Empire,  Rights  and  Principles,  are  real  and  simple 
things.  Or,  like  Shelley,  they  see  in  the  whole  human 
race  an  infinite  repetition  of  uniform  individuals,  the 
"millions  on  millions"  who  "wait,  firm,  rapid,  and 
elate."  x 

About  all  these  thing-  they  argue  by  the  old  a  priori 
methods  which  we  have  inherited  with  our  political 
language.  But  after  a  time  a  sense  of  unreality  grows 
upon  them.  Knowledge  of  the  complex  and  difficult 
world  forces  itself  into  their  minds.  Like  the  old 
Chartists  with  whom  I  once  spent  an  evening,  they  tell 
you  that  their  politics  have  been  "all  talk" — all  words — 
and  there  are  few  among  them,  except  those  to  whom 
politics  has  become  a  profession  or  a  caieer,  who  hold 

1  Shelley,  Poetical  Works   (H.  B.  Forman),  vol.  IV.  p.  8. 


172       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


on  until  through  weariness  and  disappointment  they 
learn  new  confidence  from  new  knowledge.  Most  men, 
after  the  first  disappointment,  fall  back  on  habit  or 
party  spirit  for  their  political  opinions  and  actions. 
Having  ceased  to  think  of  their  unknown  fellow  citizens 
as  uniform  repetitions  of  a  simple  type,  they  cease  to 
think  of  them  at  all;  and  content  themselves  with  using 
party  phrases  about  the  mass  of  mankind,  and  realizing 
the  individual  existence  of  their  casual  neighbours. 

Wordsworth's  "Prelude"  describes  with  pathetic  clear- 
ness a  mental  history,  which  must  have  been  that  of 
many  thousands  of  men  who  could  not  write  great  poetry, 
and  whose  moral  and  intellectual  forces  have  been 
blunted  and  wasted  by  political  disillusionment.  He 
tells  us  tiiat  the  "man"  whom  he  loved  in  1792,  when 
the  French  Revolution  was  still  at  its  dawn,  was  seen 
in  1798  to  be  merely  "the  composition  of  the  brain." 
After  agonies  of  despair  and  baffled  affection,  he  saw 
"the  individual  man.  .  .the  man  whom  we  behold  with 
our  own  eyes."  *  But  in  that  change  from  a  false  sim- 
plification of  the  whole  to  the  mere  contemplation  of 
the  individual,  Wordsworth's  power  of  estimating  politi- 
cal forces  or  helping  in  political  progress  was  gone  for 
ever. 

If  this  constantly  repeated  disappointment  is  to 
cease,  quantitative  method  must  spread  in  politics  and 
must  transform  the  vocabulary  and  the  associations  of 

i  The  Prelude,  Bk.  xiii.,  11.  81-84. 


M  KTHOD  OF  REASONING  173 


that  mental  world  into  which  the  young  politician  enters. 
Fortunately  such  a  change  Beems  at  least  to  be  beginning. 
Ev<  r\  year  larger  and  more  exact  collection-  ol  detailed 
political  facts  are  being  accumulated;  and  collections 
of  detailed  facts,  if  they  are  to  be  used  at  all  in  politi- 
cal reasoning,  must  be  used  quantitatively.  The  intel- 
lectual work  of  preparing  legislation,  whether  carried 
on  by  permanent  officials  or  Royal  Commissions  or 
Cabinet  Ministers  takes  every  year  a  more  quantitative 
and  a  less  qualitative  form. 

Compare  for  instance  the  methods  of  the  present 
Commission  <>n  the  Pour  Law  with  those  of  the  cele- 
brated and  extraordinarily  able  Commission  which  drew 
up  the  New  Poor  Law  in  1833-34.  The  argument  of 
the  earlier  Commissioners'  Report  run-  on  lines  which 
it  would  be  easy  t<>  put  in  a  priori  gyllogistic  form. 
All  men  Beek  pleasure  ami  avoid  pain.  Society  ought 
ure  that  pain  attache-  t<>  anti-social,  and  pleasure 
to  social  conduct  Inia  may  be  done  by  making  every 
man"-  livelihood  and  that  of  hi-  children  normally 
dependent  upon  his  own  exertions,  by  separating  those 
destitute  persons  who  cannot  do  work  useful  to  the 
community  from  those  who  can,  and  by  presenting 
these  last  with  the  alternative  of  voluntary  effort  or 
painful  restriction.  This  leads  to  "a  principle  which 
we  find  universally  admitted,  even  by  those  whose  prac- 
tice is  at  variance  with  it,  that  the  situation  [of  the 
pauper]    on   the   whole   shall   not   be   made   really   or 


174       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


apparently  so  eligible  as  the  situation  of  the  indepen- 
dent labourer  of  the  lowest  class."  l  The  a  priori  argu- 
ment is  admirably  illustrated  by  instances,  reported  by 
the  sub-commissioners  or  given  in  evidence  before  the 
Commission,  indicating  that  labouring  men  will  not 
exert  themselves  unless  they  are  offered  the  alternative 
of  starvation  or  rigorous  confinement,  though  no  attempt 
is  made  to  estimate  the  proportion  of  the  working  popu- 
lation of  England  whose  character  and  conduct  is 
represented  by  each  instance. 

This  a  priori  deduction,  illustrated,  but  not  proved 
by  particular  instances,  is  throughout  so  clear  and  so 
easily  apprehended  by  the  ordinary  man  that  the 
revolutionary  Bill  of  1834,  which  affected  all  sorts  of 
vested  interests,  passed  the  House  of  Commons  by  a 
majority  of  four  to  one  and  the  House  of  Lords  by  a 
majority  of  six  to  one. 

The  Poor  Law  Commission  of  1905,  on  the  other 
hand,  though  it  contains  many  members  trained  in  the 
traditions  of  1834,  is  being  driven,  by  the  mere  necessity 
of  dealing  with  the  mass  of  varied  evidence  before  it, 
onto  new  lines.  Instead  of  assuming  half  consciously 
that  human  energy  is  dependent  solely  on  the  working 
of  the  human  will  in  the  presence  of  the  ideas  of  pleasure 
and  pain,  the  Commissioners  are  forced  to  tabulate  and 
consider  innumerable  quantitative  observations  relating 
to  the  very  many  factors  affecting  the  will  of  paupers 

1  First  Report  of  the  Poor  Law  Commission,  1834  (reprinted  1894), 
p.  187. 


METHODOFREASONING  175 

and  possible  paupers.  They  cannot,  for  instance,  avoid 
the  task  of  estimating  the  relative  industrial  effectiveness 
of  health,  which  depends  upon  decent  surroundings;  of 
hope,  which  may  be  made  possible  by  State  provision 
for  old  age;  and  of  the  imaginative  range  which  is  the 
result  of  education;  and  of  comparing  all  these  with  the 
"purely  economic"  motive  created  by  ideas  of  future 
pleasure  and  pain. 

The  evidence  before  the  Commission  is,  that  is  to 
say,  collected,  not  to  illustrate  general  propositions 
otherwise  established,  but  to  provide  quantitative 
answers  to  quantitative  questions;  and  instances  are  in 
each  case  accumulated  according  to  a  well-known 
statistical  rule  until  the  repetition  of  results  shows  that 
further  accumulation  would  be  useless. 

In  1834  it  was  enough,  in  dealing  with  the  political 
machinery  of  the  Poor  Law,  to  argue  that,  since  all  men 
desire  their  own  interest,  the  ratepayers  would  elect 
guardians  who  would,  up  to  the  limit  of  their  knowledge, 
advance  the  interests  of  the  whole  community;  provided 
that  electoral  areas  were  created  in  which  all  sectional 
interests  were  represented,  and  that  voting  power  were 
given  to  each  ratepayer  in  proportion  to  his  interest. 
It  did  not  then  seem  to  matter  much  whether  the  areas 
chosen  were  new  or  old,  or  whether  the  body  elected 
had  other  duties  or  not. 

In  1908,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  felt  to  be  necessary 
to  seek  for  all  the  causes  which  are  likely  to  influence 
the    mind    of    the    ratepayer    or   candidate    during   an 


176       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


election,  and  to  estimate  by  such  evidence  as  is  avail- 
able their  relative  importance.  It  has  to  be  considered, 
for  instance,  whether  men  vote  best  in  areas  where 
they  keep  up  habits  of  political  action  in  connection 
with  parliamentary  as  well  as  municipal  contests;  and 
whether  an  election  involving  other  points  besides  poor- 
law  administration  is  more  likely  to  create  interest 
among  the  electorate.  If  more  than  one  election,  again, 
is  held  in  a  district  in  any  year  it  may  be  found  by  the 
record  of  the  percentage  of  votes  that  electoral  enthusi- 
asm diminishes  for  each  additional  contest  along  a  very 
rapidly  descending  curve. 

The  final  decisions  that  will  be  taken  either  by  the 
Commission  or  by  Parliament  on  questions  of  adminis- 
trative policy  and  electoral  machinery  must  therefore 
involve  the  balancing  of  all  these  and  many  other  con- 
siderations by  an  essentially  quantitative  process.  The 
lines,  that  is  to  say,  which  ultimately  cut  the  curves 
indicated  by  the  evidence  will  allow  less  weight  either 
to  anxiety  for  the  future  as  a  motive  for  exertion,  or  to 
personal  health  as  increasing  personal  efficiency,  than 
would  be  given  to  either  if  it  were  the  sole  factor  to  be 
considered.  There  will  be  more  "bureaucracy"  than 
would  be  desirable  if  it  were  not  for  the  need  of  econo- 
mizing the  energies  of  the  elected  representatives,  and 
less  bureaucracy  than  there  would  be  if  it  were  not 
desirable  to  retain  popular  sympathy  and  consent. 
Throughout  the  argument  the  population  of  England 
will  be  looked  upon  not  (as  John  Stuart  Mill  would 


METHOD   OF   REASONING  177 

have  -aid  i  "■(Hi  the  average  or  en  masse,'1  but  aa  con- 
n-ting of  individuals  who  can  be  arranged  in  "polygons 
of  variation"  according  to  their  nervous  and  physical 
Btrength,  their  "character'1  and  the  degree  to  which  ideas 
of  the  future  are  likely  to  affect  their  presenl  conduct. 
Meanwhile  the  public  \shich  will  discuss  the  Report 
has  changed  since  L834.  Newspaper  writers,  in  dis- 
cussing  the  problem  of  destitution,  tend  now  to  use, 
not  general  terms  applied  to  whole  social  classes  like 
the  "poor,"  "the  working  class,"  01  "the  Lower  orders,'1 
hut  term-  expressing  quantitative  estimates  of  individual 
variations,  like  "the  submerged  tenth."*  or  the  "unem- 
ployable"; while  everj  newspaper  reader  is  fairly  fa- 
miliar with  the  figure-  in  the  Hoard  of  Trade  monthly 
return-  which  record  seasonal  and  periodica]  variations 
of  actual  unemployment  among  Trade  I  nionists. 

One  could  give   many   other   instances   of   this   hegin- 
ning  "I   a  tendency   in  political  thinking  to  change  from 

qualitative  to  quantitative  form-  of  argument.  But 
perhaps  it  will  be  sufficient  to  give  one  relating  to 
international  politics.  Sixty  yean  ago  sovereignty 
was  a  simple  question  of  quality .  Austin  had  demon- 
-t rated  that  there  must  be  a  sovereign  everywhere,  and 
that  sovereignty,  whether  in  the  hand-  of  an  autocracy 
or  a  republic,  must  be  absolute.  But  the  Congress 
which  in  1885  sat  at  Berlin  to  prevent  the  partition  of 
Africa  from  causing  a  series  of  European  wars  as  long 
as  those  caused  by  the  partition  of  America,  was  com- 

1  See  p.  132. 


178       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


pelled  by  the  complexity  of  the  problems  before  it  to 
approach  the  question  of  sovereignty  on  quantitative 
lines.  Since  1885  therefore  every  one  has  become 
familiar  with  the  terms  then  invented  to  express  grada- 
tions of  sovereignty — "Effective  occupation,"  Hinter- 
land," "Sphere  of  Influence"— to  which  the  Algeciras 
Conference  has  perhaps  added  a  lowest  grade,  "Sphere 
of  Legitimate  Aspiration."  It  is  already  as  unimportant 
to  decide  whether  a  given  region  is  British  territory  or 
not,  as  it  is  to  decide  whether  a  bar  containing  a  certain 
percentage  of  carbon  should  be  called  iron  or  steel. 

Even  in  thinking  of  the  smallest  subdivisions  of 
observed  political  fact  some  men  escape  the  tempta- 
tion to  ignore  individual  differences.  I  remember  that 
the  man  who  has  perhaps  done  more  than  any  one  else 
in  England  to  make  a  statistical  basis  for  industrial 
legislation  possible,  once  told  me  that  he  had  been 
spending  the  whole  day  in  classifying  under  a  few  heads 
thousands  of  "railway  accidents,"  every  one  of  which 
differed  in  its  circumstances  from  any  other;  and  that 
he  felt  like  the  bewildered  porter  in  Punch,  who  had 
to  arrange  the  subtleties  of  nature  according  to  the 
unsubtle  tariff-schedule  of  his  company.  "Cats,"  he 
quoted  the  porter  as  saying,  "is  dogs,  and  guineapigs  is 
dogs,  but  this  'ere  tortoise  is  a  hinsect." 

But  it  must  constantly  be  remembered  that  quan- 
titative thinking  does  not  necessarily  or  even  generally 
mean  thinking  in  terms  of  numerical  statistics.  Num- 
ber, which  obliterates  all  distinction  between  the  units 


METHOD    OF    REASONING  179 

numbered,  is  aoi  the  only,  nor  always  even  the  most 
exact  means  of  representing  quantitative  facts.  A 
picture,  for  instance,  may  be  sometimes  nearer  to  quan- 
titative truth,  more  easily  remembered,  and  more  use- 
ful for  purposes  oi  argument  and  verification  than  a  row 
of  figures.  The  most  exact  quantitative  political  docu- 
ment that  I  ever  saw  was  a  set  of  photographs  of  all 
the  women  admitted  int< •  an  inebriate  home.  The  photo- 
graphs  demonstrated,  more  precisely  than  any  record 
ol  approximate  measurements  could  have  done,  the 
varying  facts  "1  physical  and  nervous  structure.  It 
would  have  been  easily  possible  for  a  committee  of 
medical  men  to  have  arranged  the  photographs  in  a 
series  of  increasing  abnormality,  and  t<>  have  indicated 
the  photograph  of  tin-  "marginal"  woman  in  whose 
case,  after  allowing  for  considerations  of  expense,  and 
for  the  desirability  of  encouraging  individual  respon- 
Bibility,  the  State  Bhould  undertake  temporary  or  per- 
manent control.  And  the  record  was  one  which  no 
one  who  had  ever  seen  it  could  forget. 

The  political  thinker  has  indeed  Bometimes  to  imitate 
the  cabinet-maker,  who  discards  his  most  finely  divided 
numerical  rule  for  some  kinds  of  specially  delicate 
work,  and  trusts  to  his  sense  of  touch  for  a  quan- 
titative estimation.  The  most  exact  estimation  possible 
of  a  political  problem  may  have  been  contrived  when 
a  group  of  men,  differing  in  origin,  education,  and 
mental  type,  first  establish  an  approximate  agreement 
as  to  the  probable  result  of  a  series  of  possible  political 


178       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


pelled  by  the  complexity  of  the  problems  before  it  to 
approach  the  question  of  sovereignty  on  quantitative 
lines.  Since  1885  therefore  every  one  has  become 
familiar  with  the  terms  then  invented  to  express  grada- 
tions of  sovereignty — "Effective  occupation,"  Hinter- 
land," "Sphere  of  Influence"— to  which  the  Algeciras 
Conference  has  perhaps  added  a  lowest  grade,  "Sphere 
of  Legitimate  Aspiration."  It  is  already  as  unimportant 
to  decide  whether  a  given  region  is  British  territory  or 
not,  as  it  is  to  decide  whether  a  bar  containing  a  certain 
percentage  of  carbon  should  be  called  iron  or  steel. 

Even  in  thinking  of  the  smallest  subdivisions  of 
observed  political  fact  some  men  escape  the  tempta- 
tion to  ignore  individual  differences.  I  remember  that 
the  man  who  has  perhaps  done  more  than  any  one  else 
in  England  to  make  a  statistical  basis  for  industrial 
legislation  possible,  once  told  me  that  he  had  been 
spending  the  whole  day  in  classifying  under  a  few  heads 
thousands  of  "railway  accidents,"  every  one  of  which 
differed  in  its  circumstances  from  any  other;  and  that 
he  felt  like  the  bewildered  porter  in  Punch,  who  had 
to  arrange  the  subtleties  of  nature  according  to  the 
unsubtle  tariff-schedule  of  his  company.  "Cats,"  he 
quoted  the  porter  as  saying,  "is  dogs,  and  guineapigs  is 
dogs,  but  this  'ere  tortoise  is  a  hinsect." 

But  it  must  constantly  be  remembered  that  quan- 
titative thinking  does  not  necessarily  or  even  generally 
mean  thinking  in  terms  of  numerical  statistics.  Num- 
ber, which  obliterates  all  distinction  between  the  units 


METHOD    OF   REASONING  179 

numbered,  is  not  the  only,  nor  always  even  the  most 
exact  means  of  representing  quantitative  facts.  A 
picture,  for  instance,  may  be  sometimes  nearer  to  quan- 
titative truth,  more  easily  remembered,  and  more  use- 
ful for  purposes  of  argument  and  verification  than  a  row 
of  figures.  The  most  exact  quantitative  political  docu- 
ment that  I  ever  saw  was  a  set  of  photographs  of  all 
the  women  admitted  into  an  inebriate  home.  The  photo- 
graphs demonstrated,  more  precisely  than  any  record 
of  approximate  measurements  could  have  done,  the 
varying  facte  of  physical  and  nervous  structure.  It 
would  have  been  easily  possible  for  a  committee  of 
medical  men  to  have  arranged  the  photographs  in  a 
Beries  of  increasing  abnormality,  and  to  have  indicated 
the  photograph  of  the  "marginal"  woman  in  whose 
case,  after  allowing  for  eon-id. -rations  of  expense,  and 
for  the  desirability  of  encouraging  individual  respon- 
sibility,  the  State  should  undertake  temporary  or  per- 
manent control.  Ami  the  record  was  one  which  no 
one  who  had  ever  seen  it  could  forget. 

The  political  thinker  has  indeed  sometimes  to  imitate 
the  cabinet-maker,  who  discards  his  most  finely  divided 
numerical  rule  for  some  kinds  of  specially  delicate 
work,  and  trusts  to  his  sense  of  touch  for  a  quan- 
titative estimation.  The  most  exact  estimation  possible 
of  a  political  problem  may  have  been  contrived  when 
a  group  of  men,  differing  in  origin,  education,  and 
mental  type,  first  establish  an  approximate  agreement 
as  to  the  probable  result  of  a  series  of  possible  political 


180       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

alternatives  involving,  say,  increasing  or  decreasing 
state  interference,  and  then  discover  the  point  where 
their  "liking"  turns  into  "disliking."  Man  is  the  meas- 
ure of  man,  and  he  may  still  be  using  a  quantitative  pro- 
cess even  though  he  chooses  in  each  case  that  method  of 
measurement  which  is  least  affected  by  the  imperfection 
of  his  powers.  But  it  is  just  in  the  cases  where  numeri- 
cal calculation  is  impossible  or  unsuitable  that  the 
politician  is  likely  to  get  most  help  by  using  con- 
sciously quantitative  conceptions. 

An  objection  has  been  urged  against  the  adoption 
of  political  reasoning  either  implicitly  or  explicitly 
quantitative,  that  it  involves  the  balancing  against  each 
other  of  things  essentially  disparate.  How  is  one,  it 
is  asked,  to  balance  the  marginal  unit  of  national  hon- 
our involved  in  the  continuance  of  a  war  with  that  mar- 
ginal unit  of  extra  taxation  which  is  supposed  to  be  its 
exact  equivalent?  How  is  one  to  balance  the  final 
sovereign  spent  on  the  endowment  of  science  with  the 
final  sovereign  spent  on  a  monument  to  a  deceased 
scientist,  or  on  the  final  detail  in  a  scheme  of  old  age 
pensions?  The  obvious  answer  is  that  statesmen  have 
to  act,  and  that  whoever  acts  does  somehow  balance  all 
the  alternatives  which  are  before  him.  The  Chancellor 
of  the  Exchequer,  in  his  annual  allocation  of  grants  and 
remissions  of  taxations,  balances  no  stranger  things  than 
does  the  private  citizen,  who,  having  a  pound  or  two 
to  spend  at  Christmas,  decides  between  subscribing  to 
a  Chinese  Mission  and  providing  a  revolving  hatch 
between  his  kitchen  and  his  dining-room. 


MATERIAL   OF    REASONING  181 

A  more  serious  objection  is  that  we  ought  not  to 
allow  ourselves  to  think  quantitatively  in  politics,  that 
to  do  so  fritters  away  the  plain  consideration  of  prin- 
ciple. "Logical  principles"  may  be  <»nl\  an  inadequate 
representation  of  the  subtlety  of  nature,  but  to  abandon 
them  is,  it  is  contended,  to  become  a  mere  opportunist. 

In  the  minds  of  these  objectors  the  only  alternative 
to  deductive  thought  from  Bimple  principles  seems 
to  be  ill*-  attitude  of  Prince  Billow,  in  his  speech  in 
the  Reichstag  on  universal  suffrage.  11«-  is  reported 
to  have  said:  ""Only  the  most  doctrinaire  Socialists 
-till  regarded  universal  and  direct  suffrage  as  a  fetish 
and  as  an  infallible  dogma.  For  his  own  part  he  was 
no  worshipper  of  idols,  and  he  did  not  believe  in  politi- 
cal dogma>.  The  welfare  and  the  Libert]  of  a  country 
did  not  depend  either  in  whole  or  in  part  upon  the  form 
of  it-  Constitution  or  of  it-  franchise.  Herr  Bebel  had 
once  >aid  that  on  the  whole  he  preferred  English  con- 
dition- even  to  condition-  in  France.  But  in  England 
the  franchise  was  not  universal,  equal,  and  direct. 
Could  it  be  said  thai  Mecklenburg,  which  had  no  popular 
suffrage  at  all.  was  governed  worse  than  Haiti,  of 
which  the  world  had  lately  heard  BUch  -trange  news, 
although  Haiti  could  boast  of  possessing  universal  suf- 
frage?" ' 

But  what  Prince  Billow's  speech  showed,   Was  that 

he  was  either  deliberately  parodying  a  style  of  scholastic 

reasoning  with   which   he   did   not    agree,    or   he   was 

incapable  of  grasping  the  first  conception  of  quantitative 

1  Times,  March  27,  1908. 


182       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


political  thought.  If  the  "dogma"  of  universal  suffrage 
means  the  assertion  that  all  men  who  have  votes  are 
thereby  made  identical  with  each  other  in  all  respects, 
and  that  universal  suffrage  is  the  one  condition  of  good 
government,  then,  and  then  only,  is  his  attack  on  it 
valid.  If,  however,  the  desire  for  universal  suffrage 
is  based  on  the  belief  that  a  wide  extension  of  political 
power  is  one  of  the  most  important  elements  in  the 
conditions  of  good  government — racial  aptitude,  min- 
isterial responsibility,  and  the  like,  being  other  ele- 
ments— then  the  speech  is  absolutely  meaningless. 

But  Prince  Biilow  was  making  a  parliamentary 
speech,  and  in  parliamentary  oratory  that  change  from 
qualitative  to  quantitative  method  which  has  so  deeply 
affected  the  procedure  of  Conferences  and  Commissions 
has  not  yet  made  much  progress.  In  a  "full-dress" 
debate  even  those  speeches  which  move  us  most  often 
recall  Mr.  Gladstone,  in  whose  mind,  as  soon  as  he 
stood  up  to  speak,  his  Eton  and  Oxford  training  in  words 
always  contended  with  his  experience  of  things,  and 
who  never  made  it  quite  clear  whether  the  "grand  and 
eternal  commonplaces  of  liberty  and  self  government" 
meant  that  certain  elements  must  be  of  great  and  per- 
manent importance  in  every  problem  of  Church  and 
State,  or  that  an  a  priori  solution  of  all  political  prob- 
lems could  be  deduced  by  all  good  men  from  absolute 
and  authoritative  laws. 


PART    II 


POSSIBILITIES    OF 
PROGRESS 


CHAPTER    I 

POLITICAL    MORALITY 

In  the  preceding  chapters  I  have  argued  that  the  effi- 
ciencj  oi  political  Bcience,  its  power,  that  is  to  say, 
oi  forecasting  the  results  of  political  causes,  is  likely 
to  increase.  I  based  mj  argument  on  two  facts,  fir-tlv, 
that  modern  psychology  offers  us  a  conception  of  human 
nature  much  truer,  though  more  complex,  than  thai 
which  i-  associated  with  the  traditional  English  politi- 
cal philosophy;  and  secondly,  that,  under  the  influence 
and  example  of  tin-  natural  sciences,  political  thinkers 
are  alreadj  beginning  t«»  use  in  their  discussions  and 
inquiries  quantitative  rather  than  merely  qualitative 
words  and  methods,  and  are  able  therefore  both  t<>  state 
their  problems  more  fully  and  to  answer  them  with  a 
greater  approximation   to  accuracy. 

In  this  argument  it  was  not  necessary  to  ask  how 
far  Buch  an  improvement  in  the  Bcience  of  politics  is 
likely  to  influence  the  actual  course  of  political  history. 
\\  hatever  may  be  the  best  way  of  discovering  truth 
will  remain  the  best,  whether  tin*  mass  of  mankind 
eh(»(»e  to  follow  it  or  not. 

But  politics  are  studied,  as  Aristotle  said,  "for  the 
sake  of  action   rather  than   of  knowledge,"  '   and   the 

1  Ethics,  Bk.  i.  ch.  iiL(6). 
185 


136 


HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


student  is  bound,  sooner  or  later,  to  ask  himself  what 
will  be  the  effect  of  a  change  in  his  science  upon  that 
political  world  in  which  he  lives  and  works. 

One  can  imagine,  for  instance,  that  a  professor  of 
politics   in   Columbia   University,  who  had  just  taken 
part  as  a  "Mugwump"  in  a  well-fought  but  entirely 
unsuccessful  campaign  against  Tammany  Hall,   might 
say:    "The  finer  and   more   accurate  the   processes  of 
political   science   become,    the    less   do   they    count    in 
politics.     Astronomers  invent  every  year  more  delicate 
methods  of  forecasting  the  movements  of  the  stars,  but 
cannot  with  all  their  skill  divert  one  star  an  inch  from 
its  course.     So  we  students  of  politics  will   find  that 
our  growing  knowledge  brings  us  only  a  growing  sense 
of  helplessness.     We  may  learn  from  our  science  to 
estimate  exactly  the  forces  exerted  by  the  syndicated 
newspaper  press,  by  the  liquor  saloons,  or  by  the  blind 
instincts  of  class  and  nationality   and  race;   but  how 
can    we    learn   to    control    them?     The   fact   that   we 
think  about  these  things   in  a  new  way  will  not  win 
elections  or  prevent  wars." 

I  propose,  therefore,  in  this  second  part  of  my  book  to 
discuss  how  far  the  new  tendencies  which  are  beginning 
to  transform  the  science  of  politics  are  likely  also  to 
make  themselves  felt  as  a  new  political  force.  I  shall 
try  to  estimate  the  probable  influence  of  these  tendencies, 
not  only  on  the  student  or  the  trained  politician,  but  on 
the  ordinary  citizen  whom  political  science  reaches  only 
at  second  or  third  hand;  and,  with  that  intention,  shall 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  187 

■  —         -  - 

treat  in  successive  chapters  their  relation  to  our  ideals 
of  political  morality,  to  the  form  and  working  of  the 
representative  and  official  machinery  of  the  State,  and  to 
the  possibilities  of  international  and  inter-racial  under- 
Btanding. 

This  chapter  deals  from  that  point  of  view  with  their 
probable  influence  on  political  morality.  In  using  that 
term  I  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  certain  acts  are  moral 
when  done  from  political  motives  which  would  not  he 
moral  if  done  from  other  motives,  or  rice  versa,  hut  to 
emphasize  the  fact  that  there  are  certain  ethical  questions 
winch  can  onh  be  Btudied  in  close  connection  with  politi- 
cal science.  There  are,  of  course,  points  of  conduct 
which  are  common  to  all  occupations.  We  mu>t  all  try 
to  he  kind,  and  honest,  and  industrious,  and  we  expect 
the  general  teacher-  of  moral-  to  help  us  to  do  so.  But 
every  occupation  has  also  it-  special  problems,  which 
must  be  stated  by  it-  own  Btudents  before  they  cm\  be 
dealt  with  by  the  moralist  at  all. 

In  politics  the  most  important  of  these  special  ques- 
tions of  conduct  is  concerned  with  the  relation  between 
the  process  by  which  the  politician  forms  his  own  opin- 
ions and  purposes,  and  that  by  which  he  influences  the 
opinions  and  purposes  of  others. 

A  hundred  or  even  fifty  years  ago,  those  who  worked 
to  create  a  democracy  of  which  they  had  had  as  yet  no 
experience  felt  no  misgivings  on  this  point.  They 
looked  on  reasoning,  not  as  a  difficult  and  uncertain 
process,  but  as  the  necessary  and   automatic  working 


188        HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


of  man's  mind  when  faced  by  problems  affecting  his 
interest.  They  assumed,  therefore,  that  the  citizens 
under  a  democracy  would  necessarily  be  guided  by 
reason  in  the  use  of  their  votes,  that  those  politicians 
would  be  most  successful  who  made  their  own  con- 
clusions and  the  grounds  for  them  most  clear  to  others, 
and  that  good  government  would  be  secured  if  the 
voters  had  sufficient  opportunities  of  listening  to  free 
and  sincere  discussion. 

A  candidate  today  who  comes  fresh  from  his  books 
to  the  platform  almost  inevitably  begins  by  making 
the  same  assumption.  He  prepares  his  speeches  and 
writes  his  address  with  the  conviction  that  on  his  demon- 
stration of  the  relation  between  political  causes  and 
effects  will  depend  the  result  of  the  election.  Perhaps 
his  first  shock  will  come  from  that  maxim  which  every 
professional  agent  repeats  over  and  over  again  to  every 
candidate,  "Meetings  are  no  good."  Those  who  attend 
meetings  are,  he  is  told,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  already 
loyal  and  habitual  supporters  of  his  party.  If  his 
speeches  are  logically  unanswerable  the  chief  political 
importance  of  that  fact  is  to  be  found,  not  in  his  power 
of  convincing  those  who  are  already  convinced,  but 
in  the  greater  enthusiasm  and  willingness  to  canvass 
which  may  be  produced  among  his  supporters  by  their 
admiration  of  him  as  a  speaker. 

Later  on  he  learns  to  estimate  the  way  in  which  his 
printed  "address"  and  that  of  his  opponent  appeal  to  the 
constituents.     He  may,  for  instance,  become  suddenly 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  189 

aware  of  the  attitude  of  mind  with  which  he  himself 
opens  the  envelopes  containing  other  candidates'  ad- 
dresses in  some  election  (of  Poor  Law  Guardians,  for 
instance),  in  which  he  is  not  specially  interested, 
and  of  the  fact  that  his  attention  is  either  not 
aroused  at  all,  or  is  onlj  aroused  by  words  and  phrases 
which  recall  some  habitual  train  of  thought.  By  the 
time  that  he  ha-  become  sufficiently  confident  or  impor- 
tant t<>  draw  up  a  political  program  for  himself,  he 
understands  the  Limits  within  which  any  utterance  must 
be  confined  that  is  addressed  to  large  numbers  of 
voters — the  fact  that  proposals  are  only  to  be  brought 
"within  the  sphere  of  practical  politics"  which  are 
simple,  striking,  and  carefully  adapted  to  the  half-con- 
scious memories  and  likes  and  dislikes  of  busy  men. 
Ml  this  means  th.it  his  own  power  of  political  rea- 
soning is  being  trained.  He  is  learning  that  every 
man  differs  from  every  other  man  in  his  interest,  his 
intellectual  habits  and  powers,  and  his  experience,  and 
that  success  in  the  control  of  political  forces  depends  on 
a  recognition  of  this  and  a  careful  appreciation  of  the 
common  factors  of  human  nature.  But  meanwhile  it  is 
increasingly  difficult  for  him  to  believe  that  he  is  appeal- 
ing to  the  same  process  of  reasoning  in  his  hearers  as 
that  by  which  he  reaches  his  own  conclusions.  He  tends, 
that  is  to  say,  to  think  of  the  voters  as  the  subject-matter 
rather  than  the  sharers  of  his  thoughts.  He,  like 
Plato's  sophist,  is  learning  what  the  public  is,  and  is 
beginning  to  understand  "the  passions  and  desires"  of 


190       HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 

that  "huge  and  powerful  brute,  how  to  approach  and  han- 
dle it,  at  what  times  it  becomes  fiercest  and  most  gentle, 
on  what  occasions  it  utters  its  several  cries,  and  what 
sounds  made  by  others  soothe  or  irritate  it."  1  If  he 
resolutely  guards  himself  against  the  danger  of  passing 
from  one  illusion  to  another,  he  may  still  remember  that 
he  is  not  the  only  man  in  the  constituency  who  has 
reasoned  and  is  reasoning  about  politics.  If  he  does 
personal  canvassing  he  may  meet  sometimes  a  middle- 
aged  working  man,  living  nearer  than  himself  to  the 
facts  of  life,  and  may  find  that  this  constituent  of  his  has 
reasoned  patiently  and  deeply  on  politics  for  thirty 
years,  and  that  he  himself  is  a  rather  absurd  item  in  the 
material  of  that  reasoning.  Or  he  may  talk  with  a 
business  man,  and  be  forced  to  understand  some  one  who 
sees  perhaps  more  clearly  than  himself  the  results  of  his 
proposals,  but  who  is  separated  from  him  by  the  gulf  of 
a  difference  of  desire:  that  which  one  hopes  the  other 
fears. 

Yet  however  sincerely  such  a  candidate  may  respect 
the  process  by  which  the  more  thoughtful  both  of  those 
who  vote  for  him  and  of  those  who  vote  against  him 
reach  their  conclusions,  he  is  still  apt  to  feel  that  his  own 
part  in  the  election  has  little  to  do  with  any  reasoning 
process  at  all.  I  remember  that  before  my  first  elec- 
tion my  most  experienced  political  friend  said  to  me, 
"Remember  that  you  are  undertaking  a  six  weeks'  adver- 
tising campaign."     Time  is  short,  there  are  innumerable 

1  Plato,  Republic,  p.  493. 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  191 

details  to  arrange,  and  the  candidate  soon  returns  from 
the  rare  intervals  of  mental  contact  with  individual  elec- 
tors to  that  advertising  campaign  which  deals  with  the 
electors  as  a  whole.  As  long  as  he  is  so  engaged,  the 
maxim  that  it  is  wrong  to  appeal  to  anything  but  the 
severest  process  of  logical  thought  in  his  constituents 
will  seem  to  him,  if  he  has  time  to  think  of  it,  not  so 
much  untrue  as  irrelevant. 

After  a  time,  the  politician  may  cease  even  to  desire 
to  reason  with  his  constituents,  and  may  come  to  regard 
them  as  purely  irrational  creatures  of  feeling  and  opin- 
ion, and  himself  as  the  purely  rational  "overman"  who 
controls  them.  It  is  at  this  point  that  a  resolute  and 
able  statesman  may  become  most  efficient  and  most 
dangerous.  Bolingbroke,  while  he  was  trying  to  teach 
bis  "Patriot  King"  how  to  govern  men  by  understanding 
them,  spoke  in  a  haunting  phrase  of  "that  staring  timid 
creature  man."  l  A  century  before  Darwin  he,  like  Swift 
and  Plato,  was  able  by  sheer  intellectual  detachment  to 
see  his  fellow-men  as  animals.  He  himself,  he  thought, 
was  one  of  those  few  "among  the  societies  of  men  .  .  . 
who  engross  almost  the  whole  reason  of  the  species,  who 
are  born  to  instruct,  to  guide,  and  to  preserve,  who  are 
designed  to  be  the  tutors  and  the  guardians  of  human 
kind."  For  the  rest,  "Reason  has  small  effect  upon 
numbers:  a  turn  of  imagination,  often  as  violent  and  as 
sudden  as  a  gust  of  wind,  determines  their  conduct."  3 

1  Letters  on  the  Spirit  of  Patriotism,  etc.  (ed.  of  1785),  p.  70. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  2.  3  jbid.f  p.  165. 


192        HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

___^___ i 

The  greatest  of  Bolingbroke's  disciples  was  Disraeli, 
who  wrote,  'We  are  not  indebted  to  the  Reason  of  man 
for  any  of  the  great  achievements  which  are  the  land- 
marks of  human  action  and  human  progress.  .  .  .  Man 
is  only  truly  great  when  he  acts  from  the  passions;  never 
irresistible  but  when  he  appeals  to  the  imagination. 
Even  Mormon  accounts  more  votaries  than  Bentham."  4 
It  was  Disraeli  who  treated  Queen  Victoria  "like  a 
woman,"  and  Gladstone,  with  the  Oxford  training  from 
which  he  never  fully  recovered,  who  treated  her  "like 
a  public  meeting." 

In  spite  of  Disraeli's  essentially  kindly  spirit,  his 
calculated  play  upon  the  instincts  of  the  nation  which 
he  governed  seemed  to  many  in  his  time  to  introduce 
a  cold  and  ruthless  element  into  politics,  which  seemed 
colder  and  more  ruthless  when  it  appeared  in  the  less 
kindly  character  of  his  disciple  Lord  Randolph 
Churchill.  But  the  same  ruthlessness  is  often  found 
now,  and  may  perhaps  be  more  often  found  in  the  future, 
whenever  any  one  is  sufficiently  concentrated  on  some 
political  end  to  break  through  all  intellectual  or  ethical 
conventions  that  stand  in  his  way.  I  remember  a  long 
talk,  a  good  many  years  ago,  with  one  of  the  leaders  of 
the  Russian  terrorist  movement.  He  said,  "It  is  no  use 
arguing  with  the  peasants  even  if  we  were  permitted 
to  do  so.  They  are  influenced  by  events  not  words.  If 
we  kill  a  Tzar,  or  a  Grand  Duke,  or  a  minister,  our 
movement  becomes  something  which  exists  and  counts 

4  Coningsby,  ch.  xiii. 


POLITICAL    MORALITY  193 

-^ —  i 

with  them,  otherwise,  as  far  as  they  are  concerned,  it 
does  not  exist  at  all." 

In   war,   the  vague   political   tradition   that   there   is 
something  unfair  in  influencing  the  will  of  one's  fellow- 
men  otherwise  than  hy  argument  does  not  exist.     This 
was  what  Napoleon  meant  when  he  said,  "A  la  guerre, 
tout  est  moral,  et  le  moral  et  l'opinion  font  plus  de  la 
moitie  de  la  realite."  '     And  it  is  curious  to  observe 
that    when    men    are    consciously    or    half-consciously 
determining  to  ignore  that  tradition  diey  drop  into  the 
language  of  warfare.     Twenty  years  ago,  the  expres- 
sion   "Class-war"    WSE   constantly    used    among   English 
Socialists  to  justify  the  proposal  that  a  Socialist  party 
should  adopt  those  methods  of  parliamentary  terrorism 
I  as  opposed  to  parliamentary  argument )  which  had  been 
invented  hy  Parnell.     When  Lord  Lansdowne  in  1906 
proposed  to  the  House  of  Lord-  that  they  should  abandon 
an)  calculation  of  the  good  or  bad  administrative  effecl 
of  measures  sent  to  them   from  the  Liberal  House  of 
Commons,  and   consider  only  the  psychological   effect 
of  their  acceptance  or  rejection  on   the  voters  at  the 
next  general  election,  he  dropped  at  once  into  military 
metaphor.     '"Let  us"  he  said,  "be  sure  that  if  we  join 
issue  we  do  so  upon  ground  which  is  as  favourable  as 
possible  to  ourselves.     In  this  case  I  believe  the  ground 
would  be  unfavourable  to  this  House,  and  I  believe  the 
juncture  is  one  when,  even  if  we  were  to  win  for  the 
moment,  our  victory  would  be  fruitless  in  the  end."  2 

1  Maximes  de  Guerre  et  Pensees  de  Napoleon  lcr  ^Chapplot).  p.  230. 

2  Hansard  (Trades  Disputes  Bill,  House  of  Lords,  Dec.  4,  1906),  p.  703. 


194       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

At  first  sight,  therefore,  it  might  appear  that  the 
change  in  political  science  which  is  now  going  on  will 
simply  result  in  the  abandonment  by  the  younger 
politicians  of  all  ethical  traditions,  and  the  adoption  by 
them,  as  the  result  of  their  new  book-learning,  of  those 
methods  of  exploiting  the  irrational  elements  of  human 
nature  which  have  hitherto  been  the  trade  secret  of  the 
elderly  and  the  disillusioned. 

I  have  been  told,  for  instance,  that  among  the  little 
group  of  women  who  in  1906  and  1907  brought  the 
question  of  Women's  Suffrage  within  the  sphere  of 
practical  politics,  was  one  who  had  received  a  serious 
academic  training  in  psychology,  and  that  the  tactics 
actually  employed  were  in  large  part  due  to  her  plea 
that  in  order  to  make  men  think  one  must  begin  by 
making  them  feel.1 

A  Hindoo  agitator,  again,  Mr.  Chandra  Pal,  who  also 
had  read  psychology,  imitated  Lord  Lansdowne  a  few 
months  ago  by  saying,  "Applying  the  principles  of 
psychology  to  the  consideration  of  political  problems 
we  find  it  necessary  that  we  .  .  .  should  do  nothing 
that  will  make  the  Government  a  power  for  us.  Because 
if  the  Government  becomes  easy,  if  it  becomes  pleasant, 
if  it  becomes  good  government,  then  our  signs  of  separa- 
tion from  it  will  be  gradually  lost."  2     Mr.  Chandra  Pal, 

1  Mrs.  Pankhurst  is  reported  in  the  Observer  of  July  26,  1908,  to  have 
said,  "Whatever  the  women  who  are  called  Suffragists  might  be,  they  at 
least  understood  how  to  bring  themselves  in  touch  with  the  public.  They 
had  caught  the  spirit  of  the  age,  learnt  the  art  of  advertising." 

2  Quoted  in  Times,  June  3,  1907. 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  195 

unlike  Lord  Lansdowne,  was  shortly  afterwards  im- 
prisoned, but  his  words  have  had  an  important  political 
effect  in  India. 

If  this  mental  attitude  and  the  tactics  based  on  it 
succeed,  they  must,  it  may  be  argued,  spread  with  con- 
stantly increasing  rapidity;  and  just  as,  by  Gresham's 
Law  in  commerce,  base  coin,  if  there  is  enough  of  it, 
must  drive  out  sterling  coin,  so  in  politics,  must  the 
easier  and  more  immediately  effective  drive  out  the 
more  difficult  and  less  effective  method  of  appeal. 

One  cannot  now  answer  such  an  argument  by  a 
mere  statement  that  knowledge  will  make  men  wise. 
It  was  easy  in  the  old  days  to  rely  on  the  belief  that 
human  life  and  conduct  would  become  perfect  if  men 
only  learnt  to  know  themselves.  Before  Darwin,  most 
political  speculators  used  to  sketch  a  perfect  polity 
which  would  result  from  the  complete  adoption  of  their 
principles,  the  republics  of  Plato  and  of  More,  Bacon's 
Atlantis,  Locke's  plea  for  a  government  which  should 
consciously  realize  the  purposes  of  God,  or  Bentham's 
Utilitarian  State  securely  founded  upon  the  Table  of 
the  Springs  of  Action.  We,  however,  who  live  after 
Darwin,  have  learnt  the  hard  lesson  that  we  must  not 
expect  knowledge,  however  full,  to  lead  us  to  perfec- 
tion. The  modern  student  of  physiology  believes  that 
if  his  work  is  successful,  men  may  have  better  health 
than  they  would  have  if  they  were  more  ignorant,  but 
he  does  not  dream  of  producing  a  perfectly  healthy 
nation;  and  he  is  always  prepared  to  face  the  discovery 


196       HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 


that  biological  causes  which  he  cannot  control  may  be 
tending  to  make  health  worse.     Nor  does  the  writer  on 
education  now  argue  that  he  can  make  perfect  char- 
acters in  his  schools.     If  our  imaginations  ever  start 
on  the  old  road  to  Utopia,  we  are  checked  by  remem- 
bering that  we  are  blood-relations  of  the  other  animals, 
and  that  we  have  no  more  right  than  our  kinsfolk  to  sup- 
pose that  the  mind  of  the  universe  has  contrived  that  we 
can  find  a  perfect  life  by  looking  for  it.     The  bees 
might  to-morrow  become  conscious  of  their  own  nature, 
and  of  the  waste  of  life  and  toil  which  goes  on  in  the 
best  ordered  hive.     And  yet  they  might  learn  that  no 
greatly  improved  organization  was  possible  for  crea- 
tures hampered  by  such  limited  powers  of  observation 
and  inference,  and  enslaved  by  such  furious  passions. 
They  might  be  forced  to  recognize  that  as  long  as  they 
were  bees  their  life  must  remain  bewildered  and  vio- 
lent and  short.     Political  inquiry  deals  with  man  as 
he  now  is,  and  with  the  changes  in  the  organization  of 
his  life  that  can  be  made  during  the  next  few  centuries. 
It  may  be  that  some  scores  of  generations  hence,  we 
shall  have  discovered  that  the  improvements  in  govern- 
ment which  can  be  brought  about  by  such  inquiry  are 
insignificant  when  compared  with  the   changes   which 
will  be   made   possible  when,   through   the   hazardous 
experiment  of  selective  breeding  we  have  altered  the 
human  type  itself. 

But  however  anxious  we  are  to  see  the  facts  of  our 
existence  without  illusion,  and  to  hope  nothing  with- 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  197 

t  — -* 

out  cause,  we  can  still  draw  some  measure  of  comfort 
from  the  recollection  that  during  the  few  thousand 
years  through  which  we  can  trace  political  history  in 
the  past,  man,  without  changing  his  nature,  has  made 
enormous  improvements  in  his  polity,  and  that  those 
improvements  have  often  been  the  result  of  new  moral 
ideals  formed  under  the  influence  of  new  knowledge. 

The  ultimate  and  wider  effect  on  our  conduct  of 
any  increase  in  our  knowledge  may  indeed  be  very 
different  from,  and  more  important  than,  its  immediate 
and  narrower  effect.  We  each  of  us  live  our  lives  in 
a  pictured  universe,  of  which  only  a  small  part  is 
contributed  by  our  own  observation  and  memory,  and 
by  far  the  greater  part  by  what  we  have  learnt  from 
others.  The  changes  in  that  mental  picture  of  our 
environment  made  for  instance  by  the  discovery  of 
America,  or  the  ascertainment  of  the  true  movements 
of  the  nearer  heavenly  bodies,  exercised  an  influence  on 
men's  general  conception  of  their  place  in  the  universe, 
which  proved  ultimately  to  be  more  important  than 
their  immediate  effect  in  stimulating  explorers  and 
improving  the  art  of  navigation.  But  none  of  the 
changes  of  outlook  in  the  past  have  approached  in 
their  extent  and  significance  those  which  have  been 
in  progress  during  the  last  fifty  years,  the  new  history 
of  man  and  his  surroundings,  stretching  back  through 
hitherto  unthought-of  ages,  the  substitution  of  an 
illimitable  vista  of  ever  changing  worlds  for  the 
imagined  perfection  of  the  ordered  heavens,  and  above 


198       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


all  the  intrusion  of  science  into  the  most  intimate 
regions  of  ourselves.  The  effects  of  such  changes  often 
come,  it  is  true,  more  slowly  than  we  hope.  I  was 
talking  not  long  ago  to  one  of  the  ablest  of  those  who 
were  beginning  their  intellectual  life  when  Darwin  pub- 
lished the  "Origin  of  Species."  He  told  me  how  he  and 
his  philosopher  brother  expected  that  at  once  all  things 
should  become  new,  and  how  unwillingly  as  the  years 
went  on  they  had  accepted  their  disappointment.  But 
though  slow,  they  are  far-reaching. 

To  myself  it  seems  that  the  most  important  political 
result  of  the  vast  range  of  new  knowledge  started  by 
Darwin's  work  may  prove  to  be  the  extension  of  the  idea 
of  conduct  so  as  to  include  the  control  of  mental  proc- 
esses of  which  at  present  most  men  are  either  uncon- 
scious or  unobservant.  The  limits  of  our  conscious 
conduct  are  fixed  by  the  limits  of  our  self-knowledge. 
Before  men  knew  anger  as  something  separable  from 
the  self  that  knew  it,  and  before  they  had  made  that 
knowledge  current  by  the  invention  of  a  name,  the  con- 
trol of  anger  was  not  a  question  of  conduct.  Anger 
was  a  part  of  the  angry  man  himself,  and  could  only  be 
checked  by  the  invasion  of  some  other  passion,  love, 
for  instance,  or  fear,  which  was  equally,  while  it  lasted, 
a  part  of  self.  The  man  survived  to  continue  his  race 
if  anger  or  fear  or  love  came  upon  him  at  the  right  time, 
and  with  the  right  intensity.  But  when  man  had  named 
his  anger,  and  could  stand  outside  it  in  thought,  anger 
came  within  the  region  of  conduct.     Henceforth,  in  that 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  199 

respect,  man  could  choose  either  the  old  way  of  half- 
conscious  obedience  to  an  impulse  which  on  the  whole 
had  proved  useful  in  his  past  evolution,  or  the  new  way 
of  fully  conscious  control  directed  by  a  calculation  of 
results. 

A  man  who  has  become  conscious  of  the  nature  of 
fear,  and  has  acquired  the  power  of  controlling  it,  if 
he  sees  a  boulder  bounding  towards  him  down  a  tor- 
rent bed,  may  either  obey  the  immediate  impulse  to 
leap  to  one  side,  or  may  substitute  conduct  for  instinct, 
and  stand  where  he  is  because  he  has  calculated  that  at 
the  next  bound  the  course  of  the  boulder  will  be  deflected. 
If  he  decides  to  stand  he  may  be  wrong.  It  may  prove 
by  the  event  that  the  immediate  impulse  of  fear  was, 
owing  to  the  imperfection  of  his  powers  of  conscious 
inference,  a  safer  guide  than  the  process  of  calculation. 
But  because  he  has  the  choice,  even  the  decision  to  fol- 
low impulse  is  a  question  of  conduct.  Burke  was  sin- 
cerely convinced  that  men's  power  of  political  reason- 
ing was  so  utterly  inadequate  to  their  task,  that  all  his 
life  long  he  urged  the  English  nation  to  follow  prescrip- 
tion, to  obey,  that  is  to  say,  on  principle  their  habitual 
political  impulses.  But  the  deliberate  following  of  pre- 
scription which  Burke  advocated  was  something  differ- 
ent, because  it  was  the  result  of  choice,  from  the  uncal- 
culated  loyalty  of  the  past.  Those  who  have  eaten  of 
the  tree  of  knowledge  cannot  forget. 

In  other  matters  than  politics  the  influence  of  the 
fruit  of  that  tree  is  now  spreading  further  over  our  lives. 


200       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


Whether  we  will  or  not,  the  old  unthinking  obedience 
to  appetite  in  eating  is  more  and  more  affected  by  our 
knowledge,  imperfect  though  that  be,  of  the  physio- 
logical results  of  the  quantity  and  kind  of  our  food. 
Mr.  Chesterton  cries  out,  like  the  Cyclops  in  the  play, 
against  those  who  complicate  the  life  of  man,  and  tells 
us  to  eat  "caviare  on  impulse,"  instead  of  "grape  nuts 
on  principle."  1  But  since  we  cannot  unlearn  our  know- 
ledge, Mr.  Chesterton  is  only  telling  us  to  eat  caviare  on 
principle.  The  physician,  when  he  knows  the  part  which 
mental  suggestion  plays  in  the  cure  of  disease,  may 
hate  and  fear  his  knowledge,  but  he  cannot  divest  him- 
self of  it.  He  finds  himself  watching  the  unintended 
effects  of  his  words  and  tones  and  gestures,  until  he 
realizes  that  in  spite  of  himself  he  is  calculating  the 
means  by  which  such  effects  can  be  produced.  After 
a  time,  even  his  patients  may  learn  to  watch  the  effect 
of  "a  good  bedside  manner"  on  themselves. 

So  in  politics,  now  that  knowledge  of  the  obscurer 
impulses  of  mankind  is  being  spread  (if  only  by  the 
currency  of  new  words),  the  relation  both  of  the  poli- 
tician and  the  voter  to  those  impulses  is  changing.  As 
soon  as  American  politicians  called  a  certain  kind  of 
specially  paid  orator  a  "spell-binder,"  the  word  pene- 
trated through  the  newspapers  from  politicians  to 
audiences.  The  man  who  knows  that  he  has  paid  two 
dollars  to  sit  in  a  hall  and  be  "spell-bound,"  feels,  it  is 
true,  the  old  sensations,  but  feels  them  with  a  subtle 

i  Heretics,  1905,  p.  136. 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  201 

and  irrevocable  difference.  The  English  newspaper 
reader  who  has  once  heard  the  word  "sensational,"  may 
try  to  submit  every  morning  the  innermost  sanctuary 
of  his  consciousness  to  the  trained  psychologists  of  the 
halfpenny  journals.  He  may,  according  to  the  sug- 
gestion of  the  day,  loathe  t!he  sixty  million  crafty 
scoundrels  who  inhabit  the  German  Empire,  shudder  at 
a  coming  comet,  pity  the  cowards  on  the  Government 
Front  Bench,  or  tremble  lest  a  pantomime  lady  should 
throw  up  her  part.  But  he  cannot  help  the  existence 
in  the  background  of  his  consciousness  of  a  self  which 
watches,  and,  perhaps,  is  a  little  ashamed  of  his  "sen- 
sations." Even  the  rapidly  growing  psychological  com- 
plexity of  modern  novels  and  plays  helps  to  complicate 
the  relation  of  the  men  of  our  time  to  their  emotional 
impulses.  The  young  tradesman  who  has  been  reading 
either  "Evan  Harrington,"  or  a  novel  by  some  writer  who 
has  read  "Evan  Harrington,"  goes  to  shake  hands  with 
a  countess  at  an  entertainment  given  by  the  Primrose 
League,  or  the  Liberal  Social  Council,  conscious  of 
pleasure,  but  to  some  degree  critical  of  his  pleasure. 
His  father,  who  read  "John  Halifax,  Gentleman,"  would 
have  been  carried  away  by  a  tenth  part  of  the  condescen- 
sion which  is  necessary  in  the  case  of  the  son.  A  voter 
who  has  seen  "John  Bull's  Other  Island"  at  the  theatre, 
is  more  likely  than  his  father,  who  only  saw  "The 
Shaughraun,"  to  realize  that  one's  feelings  on  the  Irish 
question  can  be  thought  about  as  well  as  felt. 

In  so  far  as  this  change  extends,  the  politician  may 


202       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

find  in  the  future  that  an  increasing  proportion  of  his 
constituents  half-consciously  "see  through"  the  cruder 
arts  of  emotional  exploitation. 

But  such  an  unconscious  or  half-conscious  extension 
of  self-knowledge  is  not  likely  of  itself  to  keep  pace 
with  the  parallel  development  of  the  political  art  of 
controlling  impulse.  The  tendency,  if  it  is  to  be  effec- 
tive, must  be  strengthened  by  the  deliberate  adoption  and 
inculcation  of  new  moral  and  intellectual  conceptions — 
new  ideal  entities  to  which  our  affections  and  desires 
may  attach  themselves. 

"Science"  has  been  such  an  entity  ever  since  Francis 
Bacon  found  again,  without  knowing  it,  the  path  of 
Aristotle's  best  thought.  The  conception  of  "Science," 
of  scientific  method  and  the  scientific  spirit,  was  built 
up  in  successive  generations  by  a  few  students.  At 
first  their  conception  was  confined  to  themselves.  Its 
effects  were  seen  in  the  discoveries  which  they  actually 
made;  but  to  the  mass  of  mankind  they  seemed  little 
better  than  magicians.  Now  it  has  spread  to  the  whole 
world.  In  every  class-room  and  laboratory  in  Europe 
and  America  the  conscious  idea  of  Science  forms  the 
minds  and  wills  of  thousands  of  men  and  women  who 
could  never  have  helped  to  create  it.  It  has  penetrated, 
as  the  political  conceptions  of  Liberty  or  of  Natural 
Right  never  penetrated,  to  non-European  races.  Arab 
engineers  in  Khartoum,  doctors  and  nurses  and  gen- 
erals in  the  Japanese  army,  Hindoo  and  Chinese  students 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  203 

make  of  their  whole  lives  an  intense  activity  inspired  by 
absolute  submission  to  Science,  and  not  only  English  or 
American  or  German  town  working  men,  but  villagers 
in  Italy  or  Argentina  are  learning  to  respect  the  authority 
and  sympathize  with  the  methods  of  that  organized  study 
which  may  double  at  any  moment  the  produce  of  their 
crops  or  check  a  plague  among  their  cattle. 

"Science"  however,  is  associated  by  most  men,  even 
in  Europe,  only  with  things  exterior  to  themselves, 
things  that  can  be  examined  by  test-tubes  and  micro- 
scopes. They  are  dimly  aware  that  there  exists  a 
science  of  the  mind,  but  that  knowledge  suggests  to 
them,  as  yet,  no  ideal  of  conduct. 

It  is  true  that  in  America,  where  politicians  have 
learnt  more  successfully  than  elsewhere  the  art  of  con- 
trolling other  men's  unconscious  impulses  from  with- 
out, there  have  been  of  late  some  noteworthy  declara- 
tions as  to  the  need  of  conscious  control  from  within. 
Some  of  those  especially  who  have  been  trained  in 
scientific  method  at  the  American  Universities  are  now 
attempting  to  extend  to  politics  the  scientific  concep* 
tion  of  intellectual  conduct.  But  it  seems  to  me  that 
much  of  their  preaching  misses  its  mark,  because  it 
takes  the  old  form  of  an  opposition  between  "reason"  and 
"passion."  The  President  of  the  University  of  Yale 
said,  for  instance,  the  other  day  in  a  powerful  address, 
"Every  man  who  publishes  a  newspaper  which  appeals 
to  the  emotions  rather  than  to  the  intelligence  of  its 


204       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


readers .  .  .  attacks  our  political  life  at  a  most  vulnerable 
point."  x  If  forty  years  ago  Huxley  had  in  this  way 
merely  preached  "intelligence"  as  against  "emotions"  in 
the  exploration  of  nature,  few  would  have  listened  to 
him.  Men  will  not  take  up  the  "intolerable  disease  of 
thought"  unless  their  feelings  are  first  stirred,  and  the 
strength  of  the  idea  of  Science  has  been  that  it  does 
touch  men's  feelings,  and  draws  motive  power  for 
thought  from  the  passions  of  reverence,  of  curiosity, 
and  of  limitless  hope. 

The  President  of  Yale  seems  to  imply  that  in  order 
to  reason  men  must  become  passionless.  He  would 
have  done  better  to  have  gone  back  to  that  section  of 
the  Republic  where  Plato  teaches  that  the  supreme 
purpose  of  the  State  realizes  itself  in  men's  hearts  by 
a  "harmony"  which  strengthens  the  motive  force  of 
passion,  because  the  separate  passions  no  longer  war 
among  themselves,  but  are  concentrated  on  an  end  dis- 
covered by  the  intellect. 2 

In  politics,  indeed,  the  preaching  of  reason  as  opposed 
to  feeling  is  peculiarly  ineffective,  because  the  feelings 
of  mankind  not  only  provide  a  motive  for  political 
thought  but  also  fix  the  scale  of  values  which  must  be 
used  in  political  judgment.  One  finds  oneself,  when 
trying  to  realize  this,  falling  back  (perhaps  because 
one  gets  so  little  help  from  current  language)  upon 
Plato's  favourite  metaphor  of  the  arts.     In  music  the 

1  A.  T.  Hadley  in  Munsey's  Magazine,  1907. 
2  Cf.  Plate's  Republic,  Book  iv. 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  205 

noble  and  the  base  composers  are  not  divided  by  the 
fact  that  the  one  appeals  to  the  intellect  and  the  other 
to  the  feelings  of  his  hearers.     Both  must  make  their 
appeal    to    feeling,    and    both    must    therefore    realize 
intensely   their   own    feelings.     The   conditions   under 
which  they  succeed  or  fail  are  fixed,  for  both,  by  facts 
in   our   emotional   nature   which   they   cannot   change. 
One,  however,  appeals  by  easy  tricks  to  part  only  of 
the  nature  of  his  hearers,  while  the  other  appeals  to 
their  whole  nature,  requiring  of  those  who  would  fol- 
low him  that  for  the   time   their   intellect   should   sit 
enthroned  among  the  strengthened  and  purified  passions. 
But  what,  besides  mere  preaching,  can  be  done  to 
spread  the  conception   of  such  a  harmony  of  reason 
and  passion,  of  thought  and  impulse,  in  political  motive? 
One  thinks  of  education,  and  particularly  of  scientific 
education.     But  the  imaginative  range  which  is  neces- 
sary if  students  are  to  transfer  the  conception  of  intel- 
lectual conduct  from  the  laboratory  to  the  public  meet- 
ing is  not  common.     It  would  perhaps  more  often  exist 
if  part  of  all  scientific  education  were  given  to  such  a 
study  of  the  lives  of  scientific  men  as  would  reveal  their 
mental   history   as   well   as   their   discoveries,    if,    for 
instance,  the  young  biologist  were  set  to  read  the  cor- 
respondence between  Darwin  and  Lyell,  when  Lyell  was 
preparing  to  abandon  the  conclusions  on  which  his  great 
reputation  was  based,  and  suspending  his  deepest  relig- 
ious convictions,  in  the  cause  of  a  truth  not  yet  made 
clear. 


206       HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 


But  most  school  children,  if  they  are  to  learn  the 
facts  on  which  the  conception  of  intellectual  conduct 
depends,  must  learn  them  even  more  directly.  I  my- 
self believe  that  a  very  simple  course  on  the  well- 
ascertained  facts  of  psychology  would,  if  patiently 
taught,  be  quite  intelligible  to  any  children  of  thirteen 
or  fourteen  who  had  received  some  small  preliminary 
training  in  scientific  method.  Mr.  William  James's 
chapter  on  Habit  in  his  "Principles  of  Psychology" 
would,  for  instance,  if  the  language  were  somewhat 
simplified,  come  well  within  their  range.  A  town  child 
again,  lives  nowadays  in  the  constant  presence  of  the 
psychological  art  of  advertisement,  and  could  easily  be 
made  to  understand  the  reason  why,  when  he  is  sent  to  get 
a  bar  of  soap,  he  feels  inclined  to  get  that  which  is  most 
widely  advertised,  and  what  relation  his  inclination 
has  to  that  mental  process  which  is  most  likely  to 
result  in  the  buying  of  good  soap.  The  basis  of  knowl- 
edge necessary  for  the  conception  of  intellectual  duty 
could  further  be  enlarged  at  school  by  the  study  in 
pure  literature  of  the  deeper  experiences  of  the  mind, 
A  child  of  twelve  might  understand  Carlyle's  "Essay  on 
Burns"  if  it  were  carefully  read  in  class,  and  a  good 
"sixth  form"  might  learn  much  from  Wordsworth's 
"Prelude." 

The  whole  question,  however,  of  such  deliberate  in- 
struction in  the  emotional  and  intellectual  facts  of 
man's  nature  as  may  lead  men  to  conceive  of  the 
co-ordination  of  reason  and  passion  as  a  moral  ideal 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  207 

is  one  on  which  much  steady  thinking  and  observa- 
tion is  still  required.  The  instincts  of  sex,  for  instance, 
are  becoming  in  all  civilized  countries  more  and  more 
the  subject  of  serious  thought.  Conduct  based  upon  a 
calculation  of  results  is  in  that  sphere  claiming  to  an 
ever  increasing  degree  control  over  mere  impulse.  Yet 
no  one  is  sure  that  he  has  found  the  way  to  teach  the 
barest  facts  as  to  sexual  instincts  either  before  or  during 
the  period  of  puberty,  without  prematurely  exciting  the 
instincts  themselves. 

Doctors,  again,  are  more  and  more  recognizing  that 
nutrition  depends  not  only  upon  the  chemical  compo- 
sition of  food  but  upon  our  appetite,  and  that  we  can 
become  aware  of  our  appetite  and  to  some  extent  con- 
trol and  direct  it  by  our  will.  Sir  William  Macewen 
said  not  long  ago,  "We  cannot  properly  digest  our  food 
unless  we  give  it  a  warm  welcome  from  a  free  mind 
with  the  prospect  of  enjoyment."1  But  it  would  not  be 
easy  to  create  by  teaching  that  co-ordination  of  the 
intellect  and  impulse  at  which  Sir  William  Macewen 
hints.  If  you  tell  a  boy  that  one  reason  why  food  is 
wholesome  is  because  we  like  it,  and  that  it  is  there- 
fore our  duty  to  like  that  food  which  other  facts  of  our 
nature  have  made  both  wholesome  and  likeable,  you 
may  find  yourself  stimulating  nothing  except  his  sense 
of  humour. 

So,  in  the  case  of  the  political  emotions,  it  is  very 
easy  to  say  that  the  teacher  should  aim  first  at  making 

1  British  Medical  Journal,  Oct.  8,  1904. 


208       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


his  pupils  conscious  of  the  existence  of  those  emotions, 
then  at  increasing  their  force,  and  finally  at  subordin- 
ating them  to  the  control  of  deliberate  reasoning  on 
the  consequences  of  political  action.  But  it  is  extraor- 
dinarily difficult  to  discover  how  this  can  be  done 
under  the  actual  conditions  of  school  teaching.  Mr. 
Acland,  when  he  was  Education  Minister  in  1893,  in- 
troduced into  the  Evening  School  Code  a  syllabus  of 
instruction  on  the  Life  and  Duties  of  the  Citizen.  It 
consisted  of  statements  of  the  part  played  in  social  life 
by  the  rate-collector,  the  policeman,  and  so  on,  accom- 
panied by  a  moral  for  each  section,  such  as  "serving 
personal  interest  is  not  enough,"  "need  of  public  spirit 
and  intelligence  for  good  Government,"  "need  of  honesty 
in  giving  a  vote,"  "the  vote  a  trust  as  well  as  a  right." 
Almost  every  school  publisher  rushed  out  a  text-book  on 
the  subject,  and  many  School  Boards  encouraged  its 
introduction;  and  yet  the  experiment,  after  a  careful 
trial,  was  an  acknowledged  failure.  The  new  text-books 
(all  of  which  I  had  at  the  time  to  review),  constituted 
perhaps  the  most  worthless  collection  of  printed  pages 
that  have  ever  occupied  the  same  space  on  a  bookshelf, 
and  the  lessons,  with  their  alternations  of  instruction  and 
edification,  failed  to  stimulate  any  kind  of  interest  in  the 
students.  If  our  youths  and  maidens  are  to  be  stirred  as 
deeply  by  the  conception  of  the  State  as  were  the  pupils 
of  Socrates,  teachers  and  the  writers  of  text-books  must 
apparently    approach    their     task    with    something  of 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  209 

Socrates'  passionate  love  of  truth  and  of  the  searching 
courage  of  his  dialectic. 

If  again,  at  an  earlier  age,  children  still  in  school  are 
to  be  taught  what  Mr.  Wells  calls  "the  sense  of  the 
State"1  we  may,  by  remembering  Athens,  get  some  indi- 
cation of  the  conditions  on  which  success  depends. 
Children  will  not  learn  to  love  London  while  getting 
figures  by  heart  as  to  the  millions  of  her  inhabitants  and 
the  miles  of  her  sewers.  If  their  love  is  to  be  roused  by 
words,  the  words  must  be  as  beautiful  and  as  simple  as 
the  chorus  in  praise  of  Athens  in  the  "Oedipus  Colo- 
neus."  But  such  words  are  not  written  except  by  great 
poets  who  actually  feel  what  they  write,  and  perhaps 
before  we  have  a  poet  who  loves  London  as  Sophocles 
loved  Athens  it  may  be  necessary  to  make  London  itself 
somewhat  more  lovely. 

The  emotions  of  children  are,  however,  most  easily 
reached  not  by  words  but  by  sights  and  sounds.  If  there- 
fore, they  are  to  love  the  State,  they  should  either  be 
taken  to  see  the  noblest  aspects  of  the  State  or  those 
aspects  should  be  brought  to  them.  And  a  public 
building  or  ceremony,  if  it  is  to  impress  the  unflinching 
eyes  of  childhood,  must,  like  the  buildings  of  Ypres  or 
Bruges  or  the  ceremonies  of  Japan,  be  in  truth  impres- 
sive. The  beautiful  aspect  of  social  life  is  fortunately 
not  to  be  found  in  buildings  and  ceremonies  only,  and  no 
Winchester  boy  used  to  come  back  uninfluenced  from  a 

1  The  Future  in  America,  chapter  ix. 


210       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


visit  to  Father  Dolling  in  the  slums  of  Landport;  though 
boys'  eyes  are  even  quicker  to  see  what  is  genuine  in 
personal  motive  than  in  external  pomp. 

More  subtle  are  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  the 
deliberate  intensification  by  adult  politicians  of  their 
own  political  emotions.  A  life-long  worker  for  educa- 
tion on  the  London  School  Board  once  told  me  that 
when  he  wearied  of  his  work — when  the  words  of 
reports  become  mere  words,  and  the  figures  in  the 
returns  mere  figures — he  used  to  go  down  to  a  school 
and  look  closely  at  the  faces  of  the  children  in  class 
after  class,  till  the  freshness  of  his  impulse  came  back. 
But  for  a  man  who  is  about  to  try  such  an  experiment 
on  himself  even  the  word  "emotion"  is  dangerous.  The 
worker  in  full  work  should  desire  cold  and  steady, 
not  hot  and  disturbed  impulse,  and  should  perhaps  keep 
the  emotional  stimulus  of  his  energy,  when  it  is  once 
formed,  for  the  most  part  below  the  level  of  full 
consciousness.  The  surgeon  in  a  hospital  is  stimulated 
by  every  sight  and  sound  in  the  long  rows  of  beds  and 
would  be  less  devoted  to  his  work  if  he  only  saw  a  few 
patients  brought  to  his  house.  But  all  that  he  is 
conscious  of  during  the  working  hours  is  the  one  purpose 
of  healing,  on  which  the  half -conscious  impulses  of  brain 
and  eye  and  hand  are  harmoniously  concentrated. 

Perhaps  indeed  most  adult  politicians  would  gain 
rather  by  becoming  conscious  of  new  vices  than  of  new 
virtues.  Some  day,  for  instance,  the  word  "opinion" 
itself  may  become  the   recognized   name  of  the   most 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  211 

dangerous  political  vice.  Men  may  teach  themselves 
by  habit  and  association  to  suspect  those  inclinations 
and  beliefs  which,  if  they  neglect  the  duty  of  thought, 
appear  in  their  minds  they  know  not  how,  and  which, 
as  long  as  their  origin  is  not  examined,  can  be  created 
by  any  clever  organizer  who  is  paid  to  do  so.  The 
most  easily  manipulated  State  in  the  world  would  be 
one  inhabited  by  a  race  of  Nonconformist  business  men 
who  never  followed  up  a  train  of  political  reasoning  in 
their  lives,  and  who,  as  soon  as  they  were  aware  of  the 
existence  of  a  strong  political  conviction  in  their  minds, 
should  announce  that  it  was  a  matter  of  "conscience"  and 
therefore  beyond  the  province  of  doubt  or  calculation. 

But,  it  may  be  still  asked,  is  it  not  Utopian  to  suppose 
that  Plato's  conception  of  the  Harmony  of  the  Soul — the 
intensification  both  of  passion  and  of  thought  by  their 
conscious  co-ordination — can  ever  become  a  part  of  the 
general  political  ideals  of  a  modern  nation?  Perhaps 
most  men  before  the  war  between  Russia  and  Japan 
would  have  answered,  Yes.  Many  men  would  now 
answer,  No.  The  Japanese  are  apparently  in  some 
respects  less  advanced  in  their  conceptions  of  intellec- 
tual morality  than,  say,  the  French.  One  hears,  for 
instance,  of  incidents  which  seem  to  show  that  liberty  of 
thought  is  not  always  valued  in  Japanese  universities. 
But  both  during  the  years  of  preparation  for  the  war, 
and  during  the  war  itself,  there  was  something  in  what 
one  was  told  of  the  combined  emotional  and  intellectual 
attitude  of  the  Japanese,  which  to  a  European  seemed 


212       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


wholly   new.     Napoleon   contended   against  the  "ideo- 
logues" who  saw  things  as  they  wished  them  to  be,  and 
until  he  himself  submitted  to  his  own  illusions  he  ground 
them  to  powder.     But  we  associate  Napoleon's  clear- 
ness of  vision  with  personal  selfishness.     Here  was  a 
nation  in  which  every  private  soldier  outdid  Napoleon 
in  his  determination  to  see  in  warfare  not  great  prin- 
ciples nor  picturesque  traditions,  but  hard  facts;  and 
yet  the  fire  of  their  patriotism  was  hotter  than  Gam- 
betta's.     Something  of  this  may  have  been  due  to  the 
inherited  organization  of  the  Japanese  race,  but  more 
seemed  to  be  the  effect  of  their  mental  environment. 
They  had  whole-heartedly  welcomed  that  conception  of 
Science  which  in  Europe,  where  it  was  first  elaborated, 
still  struggles  with   older  ideals.     Science   with  them 
had  allied,  and  indeed  identified,  itself  with  that  idea 
of  natural  law  which,  since  they  learnt  it  through  China 
from   Hindustan,   had   always  underlain  their  various 
religions.1     They   had    acquired,   therefore,    a    mental 
outlook  which  was  determinist  without  being  fatalist, 
and  which  combined  the  most  absolute  submission  to 
nature  with  untiring  energy  in  thought  and  action. 

One  would  like  to  hope  that  in  the  West  a  similiar 
fusion  might  take  place  between  the  emotional  and 
philosophical  traditions  of  religion,  and  the  new  con- 
ception of  intellectual  duty  introduced  by  Science. 
The  political  effect  of  such  a  fusion  would  be  enormous. 

1  See  Okakura,  The  Japanese  Spirit  (1905). 


POLITICAL   MORALITY  213 

But  for  the  moment  that  hope  is  not  easy.  The  inevit- 
able conflict  between  old  faith  and  new  knowledge  has 
produced,  one  fears,  throughout  Christendom,  a  divi- 
sion not  only  between  the  conclusions  of  religion  and 
science,  but  also  between  the  religious  and  the  scien- 
tific habit  of  mind.  The  scientific  men  of  to-day  no 
longer  dream  of  learning  from  an  English  Bishop,  as 
their  predecessors  learnt  from  Bishop  Butler,  the  doc- 
trine of  probability  in  conduct,  the  rule  that  while  belief 
must  never  be  fixed,  must  indeed  always  be  kept  open 
for  the  least  indication  of  new  evidence,  action,  where 
action  is  necessary,  must  be  taken  as  resolutely  on  im- 
perfect knowledge,  if  that  is  the  best  available,  as  on 
the  most  perfect  demonstration.  The  policy  of  the  last 
Vatican  Encyclical  will  leave  few  Abbots  who  are  likely 
to  work  out,  as  Abbot  Mendel  worked  out  in  long  years 
of  patient  observation,  a  new  biological  basis  for  or- 
ganic evolution.  Mental  habits  count  for  more  in 
politics  than  do  the  acceptance  or  rejection  of  creeds 
or  evidences.  When  an  English  clergyman  sits  at  his 
breakfast-table  reading  his  Times  or  Mail,  his  attitude 
towards  the  news  of  the  day  is  conditioned  not  by  his 
belief  or  doubt  that  he  who  uttered  certain  command- 
ments about  non-resistance  and  poverty  was  God  Him- 
self, but  by  the  degree  to  which  he  has  been  trained 
to  watch  the  causation  of  his  opinions.  As  it  is,  Dr. 
Jameson's  prepared  manifesto  on  the  Johannesburg  Raid 
stirred  most  clergymen  like  a  trumpet,  and  the  sugges- 


214       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

tion  that  the  latest  socialist  member  of  Parliament  is 
not  a  gentleman,  produces  in  them  a  feeling  of  genuine 
disgust  and  despair. 

It  may  be  therefore  that  the  effective  influence  in  poli- 
tics of  new  ideals  of  intellectual  conduct  will  have  to 
wait  for  a  still  wider  change  of  mental  attitude,  touch- 
ing our  life  on  many  sides.  Some  day  the  conception 
of  a  harmony  of  thought  and  passion  may  take  the  place, 
in  the  deepest  regions  of  our  moral  consciousness,  of 
our  present  dreary  confusion  and  barren  conflicts.  If 
that  day  comes  much  in  politics  which  is  now  impossible 
will  become  possible.  The  politician  will  be  able  not 
only  to  control  and  direct  in  himself  the  impulses  of 
whose  nature  he  is  more  fully  aware,  but  to  assume  in  his 
hearers  an  understanding  of  his  aim.  Ministers  and 
Members  of  Parliament  may  then  find  their  most  effec- 
tive form  of  expression  in  that  grave  simplicity  of 
speech  which  in  the  best  Japanese  State  papers  rings 
so  strangely  to  our  ears,  and  citizens  may  learn  to 
look  to  their  representatives,  as  the  Japanese  army 
looked  to  their  generals,  for  that  unbought  effort  of 
the  mind  by  which  alone  man  becomes  at  once  the 
servant  and  the  master  of  nature. 


CHAPTER    II 
REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT 

But  our  growing  knowledge  of  the  causation  of  po- 
litical impulse,  and  of  the  conditions  of  valid  political 
reasoning,  may  be  expected  to  change  not  only  our 
ideals  of  political  conduct  but  also  the  structure  of  our 
political  institutions. 

I  have  already  pointed  out  that  the  democratic  move- 
ment which  produced  the  constitutions  under  which 
most  civilized  nations  now  live,  was  inspired  by  a  purely 
intellectual  conception  of  human  nature  which  is  be- 
coming every  year  more  unreal  to  us.  If,  it  may  then 
be  asked,  representative  democracy  was  introduced 
under  a  mistaken  view  of  the  conditions  of  its  working, 
will  not  its  introduction  prove  to  have  been  itself  a 
mistake? 

Any  defender  of  representative  democracy  who  rejects 
the  traditional  democratic  philosophy  can  only  answer 
this  question  by  starting  again  from  the  beginning,  and 
considering  what  are  the  ends  representation  is  intended 
to  secure,  and  how  far  those  ends  are  necessary  to 
good   government. 

The  first  end  may  be  roughly  indicated  by  the  word 
consent.     The  essence  of  a  representative  government 

215 


216       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


is  that  it  depends  on  the  periodically  renewed  consent 
of  a  considerable  proportion  of  the  inhabitants;  and 
the  degree  of  consent  required  may  shade  from  the  mere 
acceptance  of  accomplished  facts,  to  the  announcement 
of  positive  decisions  taken  by  a  majority  of  the  citizens, 
which  the  government  must  interpret  and  obey. 

The  question,  therefore,  whether  our  adoption  of  rep- 
resentative democracy  was  a  mistake,  raises  the  pre- 
liminary question  whether  the  consent  of  the  members 
of    a    community    is    a    necessary    condition    of    good 
government.     To  this  question  Plato,  who  among  the 
political  philosophers  of  the  ancient  world  stood  at  a 
point  of  view  nearest  to  that  of  a  modern  psychologist, 
unhesitatingly  answered,  No.     To  him  it  was  incredible 
that  any  stable  polity  could  be  based  upon  the  mere 
fleeting   shadows   of  popular   opinion.     He   proposed, 
therefore,   in   all   seriousness,   that  the  citizens   of  his 
Republic  should  live  under  the  despotic  government  of 
those  who  by  "slaving  for  it"1  had  acquired  a  know- 
ledge   of   the    reality   which    lay   behind    appearance. 
Comte,  writing  when  modern  science  was  beginning  to 
feel  its  strength,  made,  in  effect,  the  same  proposal. 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  in  one  of  his  sincere  and  courageous 
speculations,   follows  Plato.     He   describes   a   Utopia 
which  is  the  result  of  the  forcible  overthrow  of  rep- 
resentative government  by  a  voluntary  aristocracy  of 
trained  men  of  science.     He  appeals,  in  a  phrase  con- 
sciously influenced  by  Plato's  metaphysics,  to  "the  idea 

1  Republic,  p.  494. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT      217 

of  a  comprehensive  movement  of  disillusioned  and 
illuminated  men  behind  the  shams  and  patriotisms,  the 
spites  and  personalities  of  the  ostensible  world.  .  .  ."* 
There  are  some  signs,  in  America  as  well  as  in  England, 
that  an  increasing  number  of  those  thinkers  who  are 
both  passionately  in  earnest  in  their  desire  for  social 
change  and  disappointed  in  their  experience  of  democ- 
racy, may,  as  an  alternative  to  the  cold-blooded  manip- 
ulation of  popular  impulse  and  thought  by  professional 
politicians,  turn  ''back  to  Plato";  and  when  once  this 
question  is  started,  neither  our  existing  mental  habits 
nor  our  loyalty  to  democratic  tradition  will  prevent  it 
from  being  fully  discussed. 

To  such  a  discussion  we  English,  as  the  rulers  of 
India,  can  bring  an  experiment  in  government  without 
consent  larger  than  any  other  that  has  ever  been  tried 
under  the  conditions  of  modern  civilization.  The 
Covenanted  Civil  Service  of  British  India  consists  of  a 
body  of  about  a  thousand  trained  men.  They  are 
selected  under  a  system  which  ensures  that  practically 
all  of  them  will  not  only  possess  exceptional  mental 
force,  but  will  also  belong  to  a  race,  which,  in  spite  of 
certain  intellectual  limitations,  is  strong  in  the  special 

1  Wells,  A  Modern  Utopia,  p.  263.  "  I  know  of  no  case  for  the  elec- 
tive Democratic  government  of  modern  States  that  cannot  be  knocked  to 
pieces  in  five  minutes.  It  is  manifest  that  upon  countless  important  pub- 
lic issues  there  is  no  collective  will,  and  nothing  in  the  mind  of  the  aver- 
age man  except  blank  indifference;  that  an  electional  system  simply 
places  power  in  the  hands  of  the  most  skilful  electioneers.  .  .  ."  Wells, 
Anticipations,  p.  147. 


218       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

faculty  of  government;  and  they  are  set  to  rule,  under 
a  system  approaching  despotism,  a  continent  in  which 
the  most  numerous  races,  in  spite  of  their  intellectual 
subtlety,  have  given  little  evidence  of  ability  to  govern. 

Our  Indian  experiment  shows,  however,  that  all  men, 
however  carefully  selected  and  trained,  must  still  in- 
habit "the  ostensible  world."  The  Anglo-Indian  civil- 
ian during  some  of  his  working  hours — when  he  is 
toiling  at  a  scheme  of  irrigation,  or  forestry,  or  famine- 
prevention — may  live  in  an  atmosphere  of  impersonal 
science  which  is  far  removed  from  the  jealousies  and 
superstitions  of  the  villagers  in  his  district.  But  an 
absolute  ruler  is  judged  not  merely  by  his  efficiency 
in  choosing  political  means,  but  also  by  that  outlook 
on  life  which  decides  his  choice  of  ends;  and  the  Anglo-' 
Indian  outlook  on  life  is  conditioned,  not  by  the  prob- 
lem of  British  India  as  history  will  see  it  a  thousand 
years  hence,  but  by  the  facts  of  daily  existence  in  the 
little  government  stations,  with  their  trying  climates, 
their  narrow  society,  and  the  continual  presence  of  an 
alien  and  possibly  hostile  race.  We  have  not,  it  is  true, 
yet  followed  the  full  rigour  of  Plato's  system,  and 
chosen  the  wives  of  Anglo-Indian  officials  by  the  same 
process  as  that  through  which  their  husbands  pass. 
But  it  may  be  feared  that  even  if  we  did  so,  the  lady 
would  still  remain  typical  who  said  to  Mr.  Nevinson,"To 
us  in  India  a  pro-native  is  simply  a  rank  outsider."1 

What  is  even  more  important  is  the  fact  that,  be- 
1  The  Nation,  December  21,  1907. 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     219 

cause  those  whom  the  Anglo-Indian  civilian  governs  are 
also  living  in  the  ostensible  world,  his  choice  of  means 
on  all  questions  involving  popular  opinion  depends 
even  more  completely  than  if  he  were  a  party  politician 
at  home,  not  on  things  as  they  are,  but  on  things  as 
they  can  be  made  to  seem.  The  avowed  tactics  of  our 
empire  in  the  East  have  therefore  always  been  based 
by  many  of  our  high  officials  upon  psychological  and 
not  upon  logical  considerations.  We  hold  Durbars, 
and  issue  Proclamations,  we  blow  men  from  guns,  and 
insist  stiffly  on  our  own  interpretation  of  our  rights  in 
dealing  with  neighbouring  Powers,  all  with  reference 
to  "the  moral  effect  upon  the  native  mind."  And,  if 
half  what  is  hinted  at  by  some  ultra-imperialist  writers 
and  talkers  is  true,  racial  and  religious  antipathy  be- 
tween Hindus  and  Mohammedans  is  sometimes  wel- 
comed, if  not  encouraged,  by  those  who  feel  themselves 
bound  at  all  costs  to  maintain  our  dominant  position. 
The  problem  of  the  relation  between  reason  and 
opinion  is  therefore  one  that  would  exist  at  least  equally 
in  Plato's  corporate  despotism  as  in  the  most  complete 
democracy.  Hume,  in  a  penetrating  passage  in  his  essay 
on  The  First  Principles  of  Government,  says:  "It  is 
...  on  opinion  only  that  government  is  founded;  and 
this  maxim  extends  to  the  most  despotic  and  most  mili- 
tary governments  as  well  as  to  the  most  free  and  the 
most  popular."1  It  is  when  a  Czar  or  a  bureaucracy 
find   themselves   forced   to   govern   in   opposition   to   a 

1  Hume's  Essays,  chap.  iv. 


220       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

vague  national  feeling,  which  may  at  any  moment  create 
an  overwhelming  national  purpose,  that  the  facts  of 
man's  sublogical  nature  are  most  ruthlessly  exploited. 
The  autocrat  then  becomes  the  most  unscrupulous  of 
demagogues,  and  stirs  up  racial,  or  religious,  or  social 
hatred,  or  the  lust  for  foreign  war,  with  less  scruple 
than  does  the  proprietor  of  the  worst  newspaper  in  a 
democratic  State. 

Plato,  with  his  usual  boldness,  faced  this  difficulty, 
and  proposed  that  the  loyalty  of  the  subject-classes 
in  his  Republic  should  be  secured  once  for  all  by  re- 
ligious faith.  His  rulers  were  to  establish  and  teach 
a  religion  in  which  they  need  not  believe.  They  were 
to  tell  their  people  "one  magnificent  lie";  x  a  remedy 
which  in  its  ultimate  effect  on  the  character  of  their 
rule  might  have  been  worse  than  the  disease  which  it 
was  intended  to  cure. 

But  even  if  it  is  admitted  that  government  without 
consent  is  a  complicated  and  ugly  process,  it  does  not 
follow  either  that  government  by  consent  is  always 
possible,  or  that  the  machinery  of  parliamentary  repre- 
sentation is  the  only  possible,  or  always  the  best  possible, 
method  of  securing  consent. 

Government  by  a  chief  who  is  obeyed  from  custom, 
and  who  is  himself  restrained  by  custom  from  mere 
tyranny,  may  at  certain  stages  of  culture  be  better  than 
anything  else  which  can  be  substituted  for  it.  And 
representation,    even   when   it    is    possible,    is   not    an 

^  Republic,  p.  414. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     221 

, —        > 

unchanging  entity,  but  an  expedient  capable  of  an  in- 
finite number  of  variations.  In  England  at  this  mo- 
ment we  give  the  vote  for  a  sovereign  parliament  to 
persons  of  the  male  sex  above  twenty-one  years  of 
age,  who  have  occupied  the  same  'place  of  residence 
for  a  year;  and  enrol  them  for  voting  purposes  in 
constituencies  based  upon  locality.  But  in  all  these 
respects,  age,  sex,  qualification,  and  constituency,  as 
well  as  in  the  political  power  given  to  the  representa- 
tive, variation  is  possible. 

If,  indeed,  there  should  appear  a  modern  Bentham, 
trained  not  by  Fenelon  and  Helvetius,  but  by  the  study 
of  racial  psychology,  he  could  not  use  his  genius  and 
patience  better  than  in  the  invention  of  constitutional 
expedients  which  should  provide  for  a  real  degree  of 
government  by  consent  in  those  parts  of  the  British 
Empire  where  men  are  capable  of  thinking  for  them- 
selves on  political  questions,  but  where  the  machinery 
of  British  parliamentary  government  would  not  work. 
In  Egypt,  for  instance,  one  is  told  that  at  elections  held 
in  ordinary  local  constituencies  only  two  per  cent,  of 
those  entitled  to  vote  go  to  the  poll.1  As  long  as  that 
is  the  case  representative  government  is  impossible.  A 
slow  process  of  education  might  increase  the  propor- 
tion of  voters,  but  meanwhile  it  would  surely  be  possible 
for  men  who  understand  the  way  in  which  Egyptians 
or  Arabs  think  and  feel  to  discover  other  methods  by 
which  the  vague  desires  of  the  native  population  can  be 

1  Times,  January  6,  1908. 


222       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

ascertained,  and  the  policy  of  the  government  made  in 
some  measure  to  depend  on  them. 

The  need  for  invention  is  even  more  urgent  in  India, 
and  that  fact  is  apparently  being  realized  by  the  Indian 
Government  itself.  The  inventive  range  of  Lord 
Morley  and  his  advisers  does  not,  however,  for  the 
moment  appear  to  extend  much  beyond  the  adaptation 
of  the  model  of  the  English  House  of  Lords  to  Indian 
conditions,  and  the  organization  of  an  "advisory  Coun- 
cil of  Notables";  1  with  the  possible  result  that  we  may 
be  advised  by  the  hereditary  rent-collectors  of  Bengal  in 
our  dealings  with  the  tillers  of  the  soil,  and  by  the 
factory  owners  of  Bombay  in  our  regulation  of  factory 
labour. 

In  England  itself,  though  great  political  inventions 
are  always  a  glorious  possibility,  the  changes  in  our 
political  structure  which  will  result  from  our  new  know- 
ledge are  likely,  in  our  own  time,  to  proceed  along  lines 
laid  down  by  slowly  acting  and  already  recognizable 
tendencies. 

A  series  of  laws  have,  for  instance,  been  passed  in 
the  United  Kingdom  during  the  last  thirty  or  forty  years, 
each  of  which  had  little  conscious  connection  with  the 
rest,  but  which,  when  seen  as  a  whole,  show  that  govern- 
ment now  tends  to  regulate,  not  only  the  process  of 
ascertaining  the  decision  of  the  electors,  but  also  the 
more  complex  process  by  which  that  decision  is  formed ; 

1  Mr.  Morley  in  the  House  of  Commons.     Hansard,  June  6,  1907,  p. 
885. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT    223 

and  that  this  is  done  not  in  the  interest  of  any  partic- 
ular body  of  opinion,  but  from  a  belief  in  the  general 
utility  of  right  methods  of  thought,  and  the  possibility 
of  securing  them  by  regulation. 

The  nature  of  this  change  may  perhaps  be  best  under- 
stood by  comparing  it  with  the  similar  but  earlier  and 
far  more  complete  change  that  has  taken  place  in  the 
conditions  under  which  that  decision  is  formed  which 
is  expressed  in  the  verdict  of  a  jury.  Trial  by  jury 
was,  in  its  origin,  simply  a  method  of  ascertaining, 
from  ordinary  men  whose  veracity  was  securejd  by 
religious  sanctions,  their  real  opinions  on  each  case.1 
The  various  ways  in  which  those  opinions  might  have 
been  formed  were  matters  beyond  the  cognizance  of  the 
royal  official  who  called  the  jury  together,  swore  them, 
and  registered  their  verdict.  Trial  by  jury  in  England 
might  therefore  have  developed  on  the  same  lines  as  it 
did  in  Athens,  and  have  perished  from  the  same  causes. 
The  number  of  the  jury  might  have  been  increased,  and 
the  parties  in  the  case  might  have  hired  advocates  to  write 
or  deliver  for  them  addresses  containing  distortions  of 
fact  and  appeals  to  prejudice  as  audacious  as  those  in 
the  "Private  Orations"  of  Demosthenes.  It  might  have 
become  more  important  that  the  witnesses  should  burst 
into  passionate  weeping  than  that  they  should  tell  what 
they  knew,  and  the  final  verdict  might  have  been  taken  by 
a  show  of  hands,  in  a  crowd  that  was  rapidly  degenera- 
ting into  a  mob.     If  such  an  institution  had  lasted  up 

1  See,  e.g.,  Stephen,  History  of  the  Criminal  Law,  vol.  i.  pp.  260-72. 


224       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

■  — ^— i— ■* 

to  our  time,  the  newspapers  would  have  taken  sides  in 
every  important  case.  Each  would  have  had  its  own 
version  of  the  facts,  the  most  telling  points  of  which 
would  have  been  reserved  for  the  final  edition  on  the 
eve  of  the  verdict,  and  the  fate  of  the  prisoner  or 
defendant  would  often  have  depended  upon  a  strictly 
party  vote. 

But  in  the  English  jury  trial  it  has  come  to  [be 
assumed,  after  a  long  series  of  imperceptible  and  for- 
gotten changes,  that  the  opinion  of  the  jurors,  instead 
of  being  formed  before  the  trial  begins,  should  be 
formed  in  court.  The  process,  therefore,  by  which  that 
opinion  is  produced  has  been  more  and  more  completely 
controlled  and  developed,  until  it,  and  not  the  mere 
registration  of  the  verdict,  has  become  the  essential 
feature  of  the  trial. 

The  jury  are  now  separated  from  their  fellow-men 
during  the  whole  case.  They  are  introduced  into  a 
world  of  new  emotional  values.  The  ritual  of  the  court, 
the  voices  and  dress  of  judge  and  counsel,  all  suggest 
an  environment  in  which  the  petty  interests  and  im- 
pulses of  ordinary  life  are  unimportant  when  compared 
with  the  supreme  worth  of  truth  and  justice.  They 
are  warned  to  empty  their  minds  of  all  preconceived 
inferences  and  affections.  The  examination  and  cross- 
examination  of  the  witnesses  are  carried  on  under  rules 
of  evidence  ™^:"u  result  of  centuries  of  expe- 

rience, am  iny  a  man  as  he  sits  on  a 

jury  his  fii  fallibility  of  the  unobserved 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     225 

and  uncontrolled  inferences  of  the  human  brain.  The 
"said  Fs,"  and  "thought  Fs,"  and  "said  he's,"  which 
are  the  material  of  his  ordinary  reasoning,  are  here 
banished  on  the  ground  that  they  are  "not  evidence," 
and  witnesses  are  compelled  to  give  a  simple  account 
of  their  remembered  sensations  of  sight  and  hearing. 
The  witnesses  for  the  prosecution  and  the  defence, 
if  they  are  well-intentioned  men,  often  find  themselves 
giving,  to  their  own  surprise,  perfectly  consistent 
accounts  of  the  events  at  issue.  The  barristers'  tricks 
of  advocacy  are  to  some  extent  restrained  by  profes- 
sional custom  and  by  the  authority  of  the  judge,  and 
they  are  careful  to  point  out  to  the  jury  each  other's 
fallacies.  Newspapers  do  not  reach  the  jury  box,  and 
in  any  case  are  prevented  by  the  law  as  to  contempt 
of  court  from  commenting  on  a  case  which  is  under 
trial.  The  judge  sums  up,  carefully  describing  the 
conditions  of  valid  inference  on  questions  of  disputed 
fact,  and  warning  the  jury  against  those  forms  of  irra- 
tional and  unconscious  inference  to  which  experience 
has  shown  them  to  be  most  liable.  They  then  retire, 
all  carrying  in  their  minds  the  same  body  of  simplified 
and  dissected  evidence,  and  all  having  been  urged  with 
every  circumstance  of  solemnity  to  form  their  conclu- 
sions by  the  same  mental  process.  It  constantly  happens 
therefore  that  twelve  men,  selected  by  lot,  will  come 
to  a  unanimous  verdict  as  to  a  question  on  which  in  the 
outside  world  they  would  have  been  hopelessly  divided, 
and  that  that  verdict,  which  ma)  on  questions 


226       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

of  fact  so  difficult  as  to  leave  the  practised  intellect  of 
the  judge  undecided,  will  very  generally  be  right.  An 
English  law  court  is  indeed  during  a  well-governed 
jury  trial  a  laboratory  in  which  psychological  rules  of 
valid  reasoning  are  illustrated  by  experiment;  and  when, 
as  threatens  to  occur  in  some  American  States  and  cities, 
it  becomes  impossible  to  enforce  those  rules,  the  jury 
system  itself  breaks  down.1 

At  the  same  time,  trial  by  jury  is  now  used  with  a 
certain  degree  of  economy,  both  because  it  is  slow  and 
expensive,  and  because  men  do  not  make  good  jurors 
if  they  are  called  upon  too  often.  In  order  that  popular 
consent  may  support  criminal  justice,  and  that  the  law 
may  not  be  unfairly  used  to  protect  the  interests  or 
policy  of  a  governing  class  or  person,  no  man,  in  most 
civilized  countries,  may  be  sentenced  to  death  or  to  a 
long  period  of  imprisonment,  except  after  the  verdict 
of  a  jury.  But  the  overwhelming  majority  of  other 
judicial  decisions  are  now  taken  by  men  selected  not 
by  lot,  but,  in  theory  at  least,  by  special  fitness  for 
their  task. 

In  the  light  of  this  development  of  the  jury  trial  we 
may  now  examine  the  tentative  changes  which,  since 
the  Reform  Act  of  1867,  have  been  introduced  into  the 
law  of  elections  in  the  United  Kingdom.  Long  before 
that  date,   it  had  been  admitted  that  the  State   ought 

1  On  the  jury  system  see  Mr.  Wells's  Mankind  in  the  Making,  chapter 
vii.  He  suggests  the  use  of  juries  in  many  administrative  cases  where  it 
is  desirable  that  government  should  be  supported  by  popular  consent. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     227 


not  to  stretch  the  principle  of  individual  liberty  so  far 
as  to  remain  wholly  indifferent  as  to  the  kind  of  motives 
which  candidates  might  bring  to  bear  upon  electors. 
It  was  obvious  that  if  candidates  were  allowed  to  prac- 
tise open  bribery  the  whole  system  of  representation 
would  break  down  at  once.  Laws,  therefore,  against 
bribery  had  been  for  several  generations  on  the  statute 
books,  and  all  that  was  required  in  that  respect  was  the 
serious  attempt,  made  after  the  scandals  at  the  general 
election  of  1880,  to  render  them  effective.  But  with- 
out entering  into  definite  bargains  with  individual 
voters,  a  rich  candidate  can  by  lavish  expenditure  on 
his  electoral  campaign,  both  make  himself  personally 
popular,  and  create  an  impression  that  his  connection 
with  the  constituency  is  good  for  trade.  The  Corrupt 
Practices  Act  of  1883  therefore  fixed  a  maximum  of 
expenditure  for  each  candidate  at  a  parliamentary  elec- 
tion. By  the  same  Act  of  1883,  and  by  earlier  and  later 
Acts,  applying  both  to  parliamentary  and  municipal 
elections,  intimidation  of  all  kinds,  including  the  threat- 
ening of  penalties  after  death,  is  forbidden.  No  badges 
or  flags  or  bands  of  music  may  be  paid  for  by,  or  on 
behalf  of,  a  candidate.  In  order  that  political  opinion 
may  not  be  influenced  by  thoughts  of  the  simpler  bodily 
pleasures,  no  election  meeting  may  be  held  in  a  build- 
ing where  any  form  of  food  or  drink  is  habitually  sold, 
although  that  building  may  be  only  a  Co-operative  Hall 
with  facilities  for  making  tea  in  an  ante-room. 

The  existing  laws  against  Corrupt  Practices  repre- 


228       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


sent,  it  is  true,  rather  the  growing  purpose  of  the  State 
to  control  the  conditions  under  which  electoral  opinion 
is  formed,  than  any  large  measure  of  success  in  carry- 
ing out  that  purpose.  A  rapidly  increasing  proportion 
of  the  expenditure  at  any  English  election  is  now  in- 
curred by  bodies  enrolled  outside  the  constituency,  and 
nominally  engaged,  not  in  winning  the  election  for  a 
particular  candidate,  but  in  propagating  their  own 
principles.  Sometimes  the  candidate  whom  they 
support,  and  whom  they  try  to  commit  as  deeply  as 
possible,  would  be  greatly  relieved  if  they  withdrew. 
Generally  their  agents  are  an  integral  part  of  his  fight- 
ing organization,  and  often  the  whole  of  their  expen- 
diture at  an  election  is  covered  by  a  special  subscription 
made  by  him  to  the  central  fund.  Every  one  sees  that 
this  system  drives  a  coach  and  horses  through  those 
clauses  in  the  Corrupt  Practices  Act  which  restrict 
election  expenses  and  forbid  the  employment  of  paid 
canvassers,  though  no  one  as  yet  has  put  forward  any 
plan  for  preventing  it.  But  it  is  acknowledged  that 
unless  the  whole  principle  is  to  be  abandoned,  new 
legislation  must  take  place;  and  Lord  Robert  Cecil  talks 
of  the  probable  necessity  for  a  "stringent  and  far- 
reaching  Corrupt  Practices  Act."  1  If,  however,  an  act 
is  carried  stringent  enough  to  deal  effectually  with  the 
existing  development  of  electoral  tactics,  it  will  have 
to  be  drafted  on  lines  involving  new  and  hitherto  un- 
1  Times,  June  26,  1907. 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     229 

thought-of  forms  of  interference  with  the  liberty  of 
political  appeal. 

A  hundred  years  ago  a  contested  election  might  last 
in  any  constituency  for  three  or  four  weeks  of  excite- 
ment and  horseplay,  during  which  the  voters  were  every 
day  further  removed  from  the  state  of  mind  in  which 
serious  thought  on  the  probable  results  of  their  votes 
was  possible.  Now  no  election  may  last  more  than 
one  day,  and  we  may  soon  enact  that  all  the  polling  for 
a  general  election  shall  take  place  on  the  same  day. 
The  sporting  fever  of  the  weeks  during  which  a  general 
election  even  now  lasts,  with  the  ladder-climbing  figures 
outside  the  newspaper  offices,  the  flash-lights  at  night, 
and  the  cheering  or  groaning  crowds  in  the  party  clubs, 
are  not  only  waste  of  energy  but  an  actual  hindrance  to 
effective  political  reasoning. 

A  more  difficult  psychological  problem  arose  in  the 
discussion  of  the  Ballot.  Would  a  voter  be  more  likely 
to  form  a  thoughtful  and  public-spirited  decision  if, 
after  it  was  formed,  he  voted  publicly  or  secretly? 
Most  of  the  followers  of  Bentham  advocated  secrecy. 
Since  men  acted  in  accordance  with  their  ideas  of 
pleasure  and  pain,  and  since  landlords  and  employers 
were  able,  in  spite  of  any  laws  against  intimidation,  to 
bring  "sinister"  motives  to  bear  upon  voters  whose 
votes  were  known,  the  advisability  of  secret  voting 
seemed  to  follow  as  a  corollary  from  utilitarianism. 
John  Stuart  Mill,  however,  whose  whole  philosophical 


230       HUMAN    NATURE   IN    POLITICS 

■ 

life  consisted  of  a  slowly  developing  revolt  of  feeling 
against  the  utilitarian  philosophy  to  which  he  gave 
nominal  allegiance  till  the  end,  opposed  the  Ballot  on 
grounds  which  really  involved  the  abandonment  of  the 
whole  utilitarian  position.  If  ideas  of  pleasure  and 
pain  be  taken  as  equivalent  to  those  economic  motives 
which  can  be  summed  up  as  the  making  or  losing  money, 
it  is  not  true,  said  Mill,  that  even  under  a  system  of 
open  voting  such  ideas  are  the  main  causes  which  induce 
the  ordinary  citizen  to  vote.  "Once  in  a  thousand 
times,  as  in  the  case  of  peace  or  war,  or  of  taking 
off  taxes,  the  thought  may  cross  him  that  he  shall  save 
a  few  pounds  or  shillings  in  his  year's  expenditure 
if  the  side  he  votes  for  wins."  He  votes  as  a  matter  of 
fact  in  accordance  with  ideas  of  right  or  wrong.  "His 
motive,  when  it  is  an  honourable  one,  is  the  desire  to 
do  right.  We  will  not  term  it  patriotism  or  moral  prin- 
ciple, in  order  not  to  ascribe  to  the  voter's  frame  of  mind 
a  solemnity  that  does  not  belong  to  it."  But  ideas  of 
right  and  wrong  are  strengthened  and  not  weakened 
by  the  knowledge  that  we  act  under  the  eyes  of  our 
neighbours.  "Since  then  the  real  motive  which  induces 
a  man  to  vote  honestly  is  for  the  most  part  not  an 
interested  motive  in  any  form,  but  a  social  one,  the 
point  to  be  decided  is  whether  the  social  feelings  con- 
nected with  an  act  and  the  sense  of  social  duty  in  per- 
forming it,  can  be  expected  to  be  as  powerful  when  the 
act  is  done  in  secret,  and  he  can  neither  be  admired  for 
disinterested,  nor  blamed  for  mean  and  selfish  conduct. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     231 

But  this  question  is  answered  as  soon  as  stated.  When 
in  every  other  act  of  a  man's  life  which  concerns  his 
duty  to  others,  publicity  and  criticism  ordinarily  im- 
prove his  conduct,  it  cannot  be  that  voting  for  a  member 
of  parliament  is  the  single  case  in  which  he  will  act 
better  for  being  sheltered  against  all  comment."1 

Almost  the  whole  civilized  world  has  now  adopted 
the  secret  Ballot;  so  that  it  would  seem  that  Mill  was 
wrong,  and  that  he  was  wrong  in  spite  of  the  fact  that, 
as  against  the  consistent  utilitarians,  his  description  of 
average  human  motive  was  right.  But  Mill,  though 
he  soon  ceased  to  be  in  the  original  sense  of  the  word 
a  utilitarian,  always  remained  an  intellectualist,  and 
he  made  in  the  case  of  the  Ballot  the  old  mistake  of 
giving  too  intellectual  and  logical  an  account  of  politi- 
cal impulses.  It  is  true  that  men  do  not  act  politically 
upon  a  mere  stock-exchange  calculation  of  material 
advantages  and  disadvantages.  They  generally  form 
vague  ideas  of  right  and  wrong  in  accordance  with 
vague  trains  of  inference  as  to  the  good  or  evil  results 
of  political  action.  If  an  election  were  like  a  jury 
trial,  such  inferences  might  be  formed  by  a  process 
which  would  leave  a  sense  of  fundamental  conviction 
in  the  mind  of  the  thinker,  and  might  be  expressed 
under  conditions  of  religious  and  civic  solemnity  to 
which   publicity   would    lend   an   added   weight,    as   it 

1  Letter  to  the  Reader,  Ap.  29,  1865,  signed  J.  S.  M.,  quoted  as  Mill's 
by  Henry  Romilly  in  pamphlet,  Public  Responsibility  and  Vote  by  Bal- 
lot, pp.  89,  90. 


232       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


does  in  those  "acts  of  a  man's  life  which  concern  his 
duty  to  others,"  to  which  Mill  refers— the  paying  of  a 
debt  of  honour,  for  instance,  or  the  equitable  treat- 
ment of  one's  relatives.  But  under  existing  electoral 
conditions,  trains  of  thought,  formed  as  they  often  are 
by  the  half-conscious  suggestion  of  newspapers  or 
leaflets,  are  weak  as  compared  with  the  things  of  sense. 
Apart  from  direct  intimidation,  the  voice  of  the 
canvasser,  the  excitement  of  one's  friends,  the  look  of 
triumph  on  the  face  of  one's  opponents,  or  the  vague 
indications  of  disapproval  by  the  rulers  of  one's  village, 
are  all  apt  to  be  stronger  than  the  shadowy  and  uncertain 
conclusions  of  one's  thinking  brain.  To  make  the 
ultimate  vote  secret,  gives  therefore  thought  its  best 
chance,  and  at  least  requires  the  canvasser  to  produce  in 
the  voter  a  belief  which,  however  shadowy,  shall  be 
genuine,  rather  than  to  secure  by  the  mere  manipulation 
of  momentary  impulse  a  promise  which  is  shamefacedly 
carried  out  in  public  because  it  is  a  promise. 

Lord  Courtney  is  the  last  survivor  in  public  life  of 
the  personal  disciples  of  Mill,  and  at  present  he  is  de- 
voting himself  to  a  campaign  in  favor  of  "proportional 
representation,"  in  which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  the  old  in- 
tellectualist  misconceptions  reappear  in  another  form. 
He  proposes  to  deal  with  two  difficulties,  first,  that  under 
the  existing  system  of  the  "single  ballot"  a  minority  in 
any  single-member  constituency  may,  if  there  are  more 
candidates  than  two,  return  its  representative,  and 
secondly,  that  certain  citizens  who  think  for  themselves 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     233 


instead  of  allowing  party  leaders  to  think  for  them — the 
Free-Trade  Unionists,  for  instance,  or  the  High-Church 
Liberals — have,  as  a  rule,  no  candidate  representing 
their  own  opinions  for  whom  they  can  vote.  He  pro- 
poses, therefore,  that  each  voter  shall  mark  in  order  of 
preference  a  ballot  paper  containing  lists  of  candidate? 
for  large  constituences  each  of  which  returns  six  or  seven 
members,  Manchester  with  eight  seats  being  given 
as  an  example. 

This  system,  according  to  Lord  Courtney,  "will  lead 
to  the  dropping  of  the  fetters  which  now  interfere  with 
free  thought,  and  will  set  men  and  women  on  their  feet, 
erect,  intelligent,  independent."1  But  the  arguments 
used  in  urging  it  all  seem  to  me  to  suffer  from  the  fatal 
defect  of  dwelling  solely  on  the  process  by  which  opinion 
is  ascertained,  and  ignoring  the  process  by  which  opinion 
is  created.  If  at  the  assizes  all  the  jurors  summoned 
were  collected  into  one  large  jury,  and  if  they  all  voted 
Guilty  or  Not  Guilty  on  all  the  cases,  after  a  trial  in 
which  all  the  counsel  were  heard  and  all  the  witnesses 
were  examined  simultaneously,  verdicts  would  indeed  no 
longer  depend  on  the  accidental  composition  of  the 
separate  juries;  but  the  process  of  forming  verdicts 
would  be  made,  to  a  serious  degree,  less  effective. 

The  English  experiment  on  which  the  Proportional 
Representation  Society  mainly  relies  is  an  imaginery 
election,  held  in  November  1906  by  means  of  ballot 

1  Address  delivered  by  Lord  Courtney  at  the  Mechanics  Institute, 
Stockport,  March  22,  1907,  p.  6. 


234       HUMAN    NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


papers  distributed  through  members  and  friends  of  the 
society  and  through  eight  newspapers.  "The  consti- 
tuency," we  are  told,  "was  supposed  to  return  five  mem- 
bers; the  candidates,  twelve  in  number,  were  politicians 
whose  names  might  be  expected  to  be  known  to  the 
ordinary  newspaper  reader,  and  who  might  be  con- 
sidered as  representative  of  some  of  the  main  divisions 
of  public  opinion."1  The  names  were,  in  fact,  Sir  A. 
Acland  Hood,  Sir  H.  Campbell-Bannerman,  Sir  Thomas 
P.  Whittaker,  and  Lord  Hugh  Cecil,  with  Messrs.  Rich- 
ard Bell,  Austen  Chamberlain,  Winston  Churchill,  Hal- 
dane,  Keir  Hardie,  Arthur  Henderson,  Bonar  Law,  and 
Philip  Snowden.     In  all,  12,418  votes  were  collected. 

I  was  one  of  the  12,418,  and  in  my  case  the  ballot 
papers  were  distributed  at  the  end  of  a  dinner  party. 
No  discussion  of  the  various  candidates  took  place, 
with  the  single  exception  that,  finding  my  memory  of 
Mr.  Arthur  Henderson  rather  vague,  I  whispered  a  ques- 
tion about  him  to  my  next  neighbor.  We  were  all  poli- 
ticians, and  nearly  all  the  names  were  those  of  persons 
belonging  to  that  small  group  of  forty  or  fifty  whose 
faces  the  caricaturists  of  the  Christmas  numbers  expect 
their  readers  to  recognise. 

At  our  dinner  party  not  much  unreality  was  intro- 
duced by  the  intellectualist  assumption  that  the  names  on 
the  list  were,  as  a  Greek  might  have  said,  the  same,  "to 
us,"  as  they  were  "in  themselves."  But  an  ordinary 
list  of  candidates'  names  presented  to  an  ordinary  voter 

1  Proportional  Representation  Pamphlet,  No.  4,  p.  6. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     235 


is  "to  him"  simply  a  piece  of  paper  with  black  marks  on 
it,  with  which  he  will  either  do  nothing  or  do  as  he  is 
told. 

The  Proportional  Representation  Society  seem  to 
assume  that  a  sufficient  preliminary  discussion  will  be 
carried  on  in  the  newspapers,  and  that  not  only  the 
names  and  party  programs  but  the  reasons  for  the 
selection  of  a  particular  person  as  candidate  and  for  all 
the  items  in  his  program  will  be  known  to  the  "ordi- 
nary newspaper  reader,"  who  is  assumed  to  be  identical 
with  the  ordinary  citizen.  But  even  if  one  neglects  the 
political  danger  arising  from  the  modern  concentration 
of  newspaper  property  in  the  hands  of  financiers  who 
may  use  their  control  for  frankly  financial  purposes,  it 
is  not  true  that  each  man  now  reads  or  is  likely  to  read 
a  newspaper  devoted  to  a  single  candidature  or  to  the 
propaganda  of  a  small  political  group.  Men  read  news- 
papers for  news,  and,  since  the  collection  of  news  is  enor- 
mously costly,  nine-tenths  of  the  electorate  read  between 
them  a  small  number  of  established  papers  advocating 
broad  party  principles.  These  newspapers,  at  any  rate 
during  a  general  election,  only  refer  to  those  particular 
contests  in  which  the  party  leaders  are  not  concerned  as 
matters  of  casual  information,  until,  on  the  day  of  the 
poll,  they  issue  general  directions  "How  to  vote."  The 
choice  of  candidates  is  left  by  the  newspapers  to  the  local 
party  organizations,  and  if  any  real  knowledge  of  the 
personality  of  a  candidate  or 'of  the  details  of  his  pro- 
gram is  to  be  made  part  of  the  consciousness  of  the 


236       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

ordinary  voter,  this  must  still  be  done  by  local  elec- 
tioneering in  each  constituency,  i.e.  by  meetings  and 
canvassing  and  the  distribution  of  "election  literature." 
Lord  Courtney's  proposal,  even  if  it  only  multiplied 
the  size  of  the  ordinary  constituency  by  six,  would  mul- 
tiply by  at  least  six  the  difficulty  of  effective  election- 
eering, and  even  if  each  candidate  were  prepared  to 
spend  six  times  as  much  money  at  every  contest,  he 
could  not  multiply  by  six  the  range  of  his  voice  or  the 
number  of  meetings  which  he  could  address  in  a  day. 

These  considerations  were  brought  home  to  me  by 
my  experience  of  the  nearest  approximation  to  Propor- 
tional Representation  which  has  ever  been  actually 
adopted  in  England.  In  1870  Lord  Frederick  Caven- 
dish induced  the  House  of  Commons  to  adopt  "plural 
voting"  for  School  Board  elections.  I  fought  in  three 
London  School  Board  elections  as  a  candidate  and  in 
two  others  as  a  political  worker.  In  London  the  legal 
arrangement  was  that  each  voter  in  eleven  large  dis- 
tricts should  be  given  about  five  or  six  votes,  and  that 
the  same  number  of  seats  should  be  assigned  to  the  dis- 
trict. In  the  provinces  a  town  or  parish  was  given  a 
number  of  seats  from  five  to  fifteen.  The  voter  might 
"plump"  all  his  votes  on  one  candidate,  or  might  dis- 
tribute them  as  he  liked  among  any  of  them. 

This  left  the  local  organizers  both  in  London  and  the 
country  with  two  alternatives.  They  might  form  the 
list  of  party  candidates  in  each  district  into  a  recog- 
nizable entity  like  the  American  "ticket"  and  urge  all 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     237 

voters  to  vote,  on  party  lines,  for  the  Liberal  or  Con- 
servative "eight"  or  "five"  or  "three."  If  they  did  this 
they  were  saved  the  trouble  involved  in  any  serious 
attempt  to  instruct  voters  as  to  the  individual  person- 
alities of  the  members  of  the  list.  Or  they  might  prac- 
tically repeal  the  plural  voting  law,  split  up  the  con- 
stituency by  a  voluntary  arrangement  into  single  mem- 
ber sections,  and  spend  the  weeks  of  the  election  in 
making  one  candidate  for  each  party  known  in  each 
section.  The  first  method  was  generally  adopted  in  the 
provinces,  and  had  all  the  good  and  bad  effects  from  a 
party  point  of  view  of  the  French  scrutin  de  liste.  The 
second  method  was  adopted  in  London,  and  perhaps 
tended  to  make  the  London  elections  turn  more  than  they 
otherwise  would  have  done  upon  the  qualities  of  indi- 
vidual candidates.  Whichever  system  was  adopted  by 
the  party  leaders  was  acted  upon  by  practically  all  the 
voters,  with  the  exception  of  the  well-organized  Roman 
Catholics,  who  voted  for  a  Church  and  not  a  person,  and 
of  those  who  plumped  for  representatives  of  the  special 
interests  of  the  teachers  or  school-keepers. 

If  Lord  Courtney's  proposal  is  adopted  for  parlia- 
mentary elections,  it  is  the  "ticket"  system  which,  owing 
to  the  intensity  of  party  feeling,  will  be  generally  used. 
Each  voter  will  bring  into  the  polling  booth  a  printed 
copy  of  the  ballot  paper  marked  with  the  numbers  1, 
2,  3,  etc.,  according  to  the  decision  of  his  party  associa- 
tion, and  will  copy  the  numbers  onto  the  unmarked 
official  paper.     The  essential  fact,  that  is  to  say,   on 


238       HUMAN    NATURE    IN   POLITICS 


* 


which  party  tactics  would  depend  under  Lord  Court- 
ney's scheme  is  not  that  the  votes  would  finally  be  added 
up  in  this  way  or  in  that,  but  that  the  voter  would  be 
required  to  arrange  in  order  more  names  than  there  is 
time  during  the  election  to  turn  for  him  into  real  persons. 
Lord  Courtney,  in  speaking  on  the  second  reading  of 
his    Municipal    Representation    Bill    in   the   House    of 
Lords, x  contrasted  his  proposed  system  with  that  used 
in  the  London  Borough  Council  elections,  according  to 
which  a  number  of  seats  are  assigned  to  each  ward,  and 
the  voter  may  give  one  vote  each,  without  indication  of 
preference,  to  that  number  of  candidates.     It  is  true  that 
the  electoral  machinery  for  the  London  Boroughs  is  the 
worst  to  be  found  anywhere  in  the  world  outside  of 
America.     I  have  before  me  my  party  ballot-card  in- 
structing me  how  to  vote  at  the  last  Council  election  in 
my  present  borough.     There  were  six  seats  to  be  filled 
in  my  ward  and  fifteen  candidates.     I  voted  as  I  was 
told  by  my  party  organization,  giving  one  vote  each  to 
six  names,  not  one  of  which  I  remembered  to  have  seen 
before.     If  there  had  been  one  seat  to  be  filled,  and 
say,  three  candidates,  I  should  have  found  out  enough 
about  one  candidate  at  least  to  give  a  more  or  less  inde- 
pendent vote;  and  the  local  party  committees  would  have 
known  that  I  and  others  would  do  so.     Each  party  would 
then  have  circulated  a  portrait  and  a  printed  account  of 
their  candidate  and  of  his  principles,  and  would  have 
had  a  strong  motive  for  choosing  a  thoroughly  reputa- 

i  April  30,  1907. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     239 

ble  person.  But  I  could  not  give  the  time  necessary 
for  forming  a  real  opinion  on  fifteen  candidates,  who 
volunteered  no  information  about  themselves.  I  there- 
fore, and  probably  twenty-nine  out  of  every  thirty  of 
those  who  voted  in  the  borough,  voted  a  "straight  ticket." 
If  for  any  reason  the  party  committee  put,  to  use  an 
Americanism,  a  "yellow  dog"  among  the  list  of  names, 
I  voted  for  the  yellow  dog. 

Under  Lord  Courtney's  system  I  should  have  had  to 
vote  on  the  same  ticket,  with  the  same  amount  of  know- 
ledge, but  should  have  copied  down  different  marks 
from  my  party  card.  On  the  assumption,  that  is  to 
say,  that  every  name  on  a  long  ballot  paper  represents 
an  individual  known  to  every  voter  there  would  be  an 
enormous  difference  between  Lord  Courtney's  proposed 
system  and  the  existing  system  in  the  London  Boroughs. 
But  if  the  fact  is  that  the  names  in  each  case  are  mere 
names,  there  is  little  effective  difference  between  the 
working  of  the  two  systems  until  the  votes  are  counted. 

If  the  sole  object  of  an  election  were  to  discover  and 
record  the  exact  proportion  of  the  electorate  who  are 
prepared  to  vote  for  candidates  nominated  by  the  sev- 
eral party  organizations  Lord  Courtney's  scheme  might 
be  adopted  as  a  whole.  But  English  experience,  and  a 
longer  experience  in  America,  has  shown  that  the  per- 
sonality of  the  candidate  nominated  is  at  least  as  impor- 
tant as  his  party  allegiance,  and  that  a  parliament  of  well- 
selected  members  who  represent  somewhat  roughly  the 
opinions  of  the  nation  is  better  than  a  parliament  of  ill- 


240 


HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


selected  members  who,  as  far  as  their  party  labels  are 
concerned,  are,  to  quote  Lord  Courtney,  "a  distillation, 
a  quintessence,  a  microcosm,  a  reflection  of  the  com- 
munity."1 

To   Lord   Courtney   the   multi-member  constituency, 
which  permits  of  a  wide  choice,  and  the  preferential 
vote,  which  permits  of  full  use  of  that  choice,  are  equally 
essential  parts  of  his  plan;  and  that  plan  will  soon  be 
seriously  discussed,  because  parliament,  owing  to  the  rise 
of  the  Labour  Party  and  the  late  prevalence  of  "three- 
cornered"  contests,  will  soon  have  to  deal  with  the  ques- 
tion.    It  will  then  be  interesting  to  see  whether  the  grow- 
ing substitution  of  the  new  quantitative  and  psycholog- 
ical for  the  old  absolute  and  logical  way  of  thinking 
about  elections  will  have  advanced  sufficiently  far  to 
enable  the  House  of  Commons  to  distinguish  between  the 
two   points.     If   so,   they   will   adopt   the   transferable 
vote,  and  so  get  over  the  difficulty  of  three-cornered  elec- 
tions, while  retaining  single-member  constituencies,  and 
therewith  the  possibility  of  making  the  personality  of  a 
candidate  known  to  the  whole  of  his  constituents. 

A  further  effect  of  the  way  in  which  we  are  begin- 
ning to  think  of  the  electoral  process  is  that,  since 
1888,  parliament,  in  reconstructing  the  system  of  English 
local  government,  has  steadily  diminished  the  numbei 
of  elections,  with  the  avowed  purpose  of  increasing  their 
efficiency.  The  Local  Government  Acts  of  1888  and 
1894  swept  away  thousands  of  elections  for  Improve- 

1  Address  at  Stockport,  p.  11. 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     241 

ment  Boards,  Burial  Boards,  Vestries,  etc.  Jn  1902  the 
separately  elected  School  Boards  were  abolished,  and 
it  is  certain  that  the  Guardians  of  the  Poor  will  soon 
follow  them.  The  Rural  Parish  Councils,  which  were 
created  in  1894,  and  which  represented  a  reversion  by  the 
Liberal  Party  to  the  older  type  of  democratic  thought, 
have  been  a  failure,  and  will  either  be  abolished  or  will 
remain  ineffective,  because  no  real  administrative  powers 
will  be  given  to  them.  But  if  we  omit  the  rural  dis- 
tricts, the  inhabitant  of  a  "county  borough"  will  soon 
vote  only  for  parliament  and  his  borough  council,  while 
the  inhabitant  of  London  or  of  an  urban  district  or  non- 
county  borough  will  only  vote  for  parliament,  his  county, 
and  his  district  or  borough  council.  On  the  average, 
neither  will  be  asked  to  vote  more  than  once  a  year. 

In  America  one  notices  a  similiar  tendency  towards 
electoral  concentration  as  a  means  of  increasing  elec- 
toral responsibility.  In  Philadelphia  I  found  that  this 
concentration  had  taken  a  form  which  seemed  to  me  to 
be  due  to  a  rather  elementary  quantitative  mistake  in 
psychology.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  the  reformers  had 
thought  only  of  economizing  political  force,  and  had 
ignored  the  limitations  of  political  knowledge,  so  many 
elections  were  combined  on  one  day  that  the  Philadel- 
phia "blanket-ballot"  which  I  was  shown,  with  its  paral- 
lel columns  of  party  "tickets,"  containing  some  four 
hundred  names.  The  resulting  effects  on  the  personnel 
of  Philadelphian  politics  were  as  obvious  as  they  were 
lamentable.     In  other  American  cities,  however,  con- 


242       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


centration  often  takes  the  form  of  the  abolition  of  many 
of  the  elected  boards  and  officials,  and  the  substitution 
for  them  of  a  single  elected  Mayor,  who  administers  the 
city  by  nominated  commissions,  and  whose  personality 
it  is  hoped  can  be  made  known  during  an  election  to  all 
the  voters,  and  therefore  must  be  seriously  considered 
by  his  nominators. 

One  noticed  again  the  growing  tendency  to  substitute 
a  quantitative  and  psychological  for  an  absolute  and 
logical  view  of  the  electoral  process  in  the  House  of 
Commons  debate  on  the  claim  set  up  by  the  House  of 
Lords  in  1907  to  the  right  of  forcing  a  general  elec- 
tion (or  a  referendum)  at  any  moment  which  they 
thought  advantageous  to  themselves.  Mr.  Herbert 
Samuel,  for  instance,  argued  that  this  claim,  if  allowed, 
would  give  a  still  further  advantage  in  politics  to  the 
electoral  forces  of  wealth,  acting,  at  dates  carefully 
chosen  by  the  House  of  Lords,  both  directly  and  through 
the  control  of  the  Press.  Lord  Robert  Cecil  alone, 
whose  mind  is  historical  in  the  worst  sense  of  that 
term,  objected  "What  a  commentary  was  that  on  the 
'will  of  the  people'  "  1  and  thought  it  somehow  illegit- 
imate that  Mr.  Samuel  should  not  defend  democracy 
according  to  the  philosophy  of  Thomas  Paine,  so  that  he 
could  answer  in  the  style  of  Canning.  The  present  quar- 
rel between  the  two  Houses  may  indeed  result  in  a  fur- 
ther step  in  the  public  control  of  the  methods  of  pro- 
ducing    political     opinion     by     the     substitution     of 

1  Times,  June  25,  1907. 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     243 


General  Elections  occurring  at  regular  intervals  for  our 
present  system  of  sudden  party  dissolutions  at  moments 
of  national  excitement. 

But  in  the  electoral  process,   as   in  so  many  other 
cases,   one  dares  not  hope  that  these  slow  and  half- 
conscious  changes  in  the  general   intellectual   attitude 
will  be  sufficient  to  suggest  and  carry  through  all  the 
improvements    of   machinery   necessary   to    meet   our 
growing   difficulties,   unless   they   are   quickened   by   a 
conscious  purpose.     At  my  last  contest  for  the  London 
County  Council  I  had  to  spend  the  half  hour  before 
the  close  of  the  vote  in  one  of  the  polling  stations  of 
a  very  poor  district.     I  was  watching  the  proceedings, 
which  in  the   crush   at  the  end   are  apt  to  be   rather 
irregular,  and  at  the  same  time  was  thinking  of  this 
book.     The  voters  who  came  in  were  the  result  of  the 
"final  rally"  of  the  canvassers  on  both  sides.     They 
entered   the   room   in   rapid   but   irregular   succession, 
as   if  they  were  jerked   forward   by   a   hurried     and 
inefficient  machine.     About  half  of  them  were  women, 
with  broken  straw  hats,  pallid  faces,  and  untidy  hair. 
All  were  dazed  and  bewildered,  having  been  snatched 
away  in  carriages  or  motors  from  the  making  of  match- 
boxes, or  button-holes,  or  cheap  furniture,  or  from  the 
public  house,  or,  since  it  was  Saturday  evening,  from 
bed.     Most    of    them    seemed    to    be    trying,    in    the 
unfamiliar  surroundings,  to  be  sure  of  the  name  for 
which,  as  they  had  been  reminded  at  the  door,  they 
were  to  vote.     A  few  were  drunk,  and  one  man,  who 


244       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


was  apparently  a  supporter  of  my  own,  clung  to  my 
neck  while  he  tried  to  tell  me  of  some  vaguely 
tremendous  fact  which  just  eluded  his  power  of 
speech.  I  was  very  anxious  to  win,  and  inclined  to 
think  I  had  won,  but  my  chief  feeling  was  an  intense 
conviction  that  this  could  not  be  accepted  as  even  a 
decently  satisfactory  method  of  creating  a  government 
for  a  city  of  five  million  inhabitants,  and  that  nothing 
short  of  a  conscious  and  resolute  facing  of  the  whole 
problem  of  the  formation  of  political  opinion  would  en- 
able us  to  improve  it. 

Something  might  be  done,  and  perhaps  will  be  done 
in  the  near  future,  to  abolish  the  more  sordid  details 
of  English  electioneering.  Public  houses  could  be 
closed  on  the  election  day,  both  to  prevent  drunken- 
ness and  casual  treating,  and  to  create  an  atmosphere 
of  comparative  seriousness.  It  is  a  pity  that  we  cannot 
have  the  elections  on  a  Sunday  as  they  have  in  France. 
The  voters  would  then  come  to  the  poll  after  twenty  or 
twenty-four  hours'  rest,  and  their  own  thoughts  would 
have  some  power  of  asserting  themselves  even  in 
the  presence  of  the  canvasser,  whose  hustling  energy 
now  inevitably  dominates  the  tired  nerves  of  men  who 
have  just  finished  their  day's  work.  The  feeling 
of  moral  responsibility  half  consciously  associated  with 
the  religious  use  of  Sunday  would  also  be  so  valuable 
an  aid  to  reflection  that  the  most  determined  anti- 
clerical might  be  willing  to  risk  the  chance  that  it 
would  add  to  the  political  power  of  the  churches.     It 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     245 

may  cease  to  be  true  that  in  England  the  Christian 
day  of  rest,  in  spite  of  the  recorded  protest  of  the 
founder  of  Christianity,  is  still  too  much  hedged  about 
by  the  traditions  of  prehistoric  taboo  to  be  available 
for  the  most  solemn  act  of  citizenship.  It  might 
again  be  possible  to  lend  to  the  polling-place  some  of 
the  dignity  of  a  law  court,  and  if  no  better  buildings 
were  available,  at  least  to  clean  and  decorate  the  dingy 
schoolrooms  now  used.  But  such  improvements  in  the 
external  environment  of  election  day,  however  desir- 
able they  may  be  in  themselves,  can  only  be  of  small 
effect. 

Some  writers  argue  or  imply  that  all  difficulties  in 
the  working  of  the  electoral  process  will  disappear  of 
themselves  as  men  approach  to  social  equality.  Those 
who  are  now  rich  will,  they  believe,  have  neither  motive 
for  corrupt  electoral  expenditure,  nor  superfluity 
of  money  to  spend  on  it;  while  the  women  and 
the  working  men  who  are  now  unenfranchised  or 
[politically  inactive,  will  bring  into  politics  a  fresh 
stream  of  unspoilt  impulse. 

If  our  civilization  is  to  survive,  greater  social  equality 
must  indeed  come.  Men  will  not  continue  to  live 
peacefully  together  in  huge  cities  under  conditions 
that  are  intolerable  to  any  sensitive  mind,  both  among 
those  who  profit,  and  those  who  suffer  by  them.  But 
no  one  who  is  near  to  political  facts  can  believe  that 
the  immediate  effect  either  of  greater  equality  or  of 
the   extension  of  the   suffrage  will  be  to   clear   away 


246       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


all  moral  and  intellectual  difficulties  in  political  organ- 
ization. 

A  mere  numerical  increase  in  the  number  of  persons 
in  England  who  are  interested  in  politics  would  indeed 
itself  introduce  a  new  and  difficult  political  factor. 
The  active  politicians  in  England,  those  who  take 
any  part  in  politics  beyond  voting,  are  at  present  a 
tiny  minority.  I  was  to  speak  not  long  ago  at  an 
election  meeting,  and  having  been  misdirected  as  to 
the  place  where  the  meeting  was  to  be  held,  found  my- 
self in  an  unknown  part  of  North  London,  compelled 
to  inquire  of  the  inhabitants  until  I  should  find  the 
address  either  of  the  meeting-hall  or  of  the  party  com- 
mittee-room. For  a  long  time  I  drew  blank,  but  at 
last  a  cabman  on  his  way  home  to  tea  told  me  that 
there  was  a  milkman  in  his  street  who  was  "a  politician 
and  would  know."  There  are  in  London  seven  hundred 
thousand  parliamentary  voters,  and  I  am  informed  by 
the  man  who  is  in  the  best  position  to  know  that  it 
would  be  safe  to  say  that  less  than  ten  thousand  per- 
sons actually  attend  the  annual  ward  meetings  of  the 
various  parties,  and  that  not  more  than  thirty 
thousand  are  members  of  the  party  associations.  That 
division  of  labour  which  assigns  politics  to  a  special 
class  of  enthusiasts,  looked  on  by  many  of  their  neigh- 
bours as  well-meaning  busybodies,  is  not  carried  so  far 
in  most  other  parts  of  England  as  in  London. 
But  in  no  county  in  England,  as  far  as  I  am  aware, 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     247 

does  the  number  of  persons   really   active   in  politics 
amount  to  ten  per  cent,  of  the  electorate. 

There  are,  I  think,  signs  that  this  may  soon  cease  to 
be  true.  The  English  Elementary  Education  Act  was 
passed  in  1870,  and  the  elementary  schools  may  be  said 
to  have  become  fairly  efficient  by  1880.  Those  who 
entered  them,  being  six  years  old,  at  that  date  are 
now  aged  thirty-four.  The  statistics  as  to  the  pro- 
duction and  sale  of  newspapers  and  cheap  books  and 
the  use  of  free  libraries,  show  that  the  younger  work- 
ing men  and  women  in  England  read  many  times 
as  much  as  their  parents  did.  This,  and  the  general 
increase  of  intellectual  activity  in  our  cities  of  which 
it  is  only  a  part,  may  very  probably  lead,  as  the  social 
question  in  politics  grows  more  serious,  to  a  large 
extension  of  electoral  interest.  If  so,  the  little  groups 
of  men  and  women  who  now  manage  the  three  English 
parties  in  the  local  constituencies  will  find  themselves 
swamped  by  thousands  of  adherents  who  will  insist  on 
taking  some  part  in  the  choice  of  candidates  and  the 
formation  of  programs.  That  will  lead  to  a  great 
increase  in  the  complexity  of  the  process  by  which  the 
Council,  the  Executive,  and  the  officers  of  each  local 
party  association  are  appointed.  Parliament  indeed 
may  find  itself  compelled,  as  many  of  the  American 
States  have  been  compelled,  to  pass  a  series  of  Acts  for 
the  prevention  of  fraud  in  the  interior  government  of 
parties.     The  ordinary  citizen  would  find  then,  much 


248       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


more  obviously  than  he  does  at  present,  that  an  effective 
use  of  his  voting  power  involves  not  only  the  marking 
of  a  ballot  paper  on  the  day  of  the  election,  but  an 
active  share  in  that  work  of  appointing  and  controlling 
party  committtees  from  which  many  men  whose 
opinions  are  valuable  to  the  State  shrink  with  an 
instinctive  dread. 

But  the  most  important  difficulties  raised  by  the 
extension  of  political  interest  from  a  very  small  to  a 
large  fraction  of  the  population  would  be  concerned  with 
political  motive  rather  than  political  machinery. 
It  is  astonishing  that  the  early  English  democrats,  who 
supposed  that  individual  advantage  would  be  the  sole 
driving  force  in  politics,  assumed,  without  realizing  the 
nature  of  their  own  assumption,  that  the  representative, 
if  he  were  elected  for  a  short  term,  would  inevitably 
feel  his  own  advantage  to  be  identical  with  that  of  the 
community.1  At  present  there  is  a  fairly  sufficient 
supply  of  men  whose  imagination  and  sympathies  are 
sufficiently  quick  and  wide  to  make  them  ready  to 
undertake  the  toil  of  unpaid  electioneering  and 
adminstration  for  the  general  good.  But  every 
organizer  of  elections  knows  that  the  supply  is  never 
more  than  sufficient,  and  payment  of  members,  while 
it  would  permit  men  of  good-will  to  come  forward  who 

1  E.g.,  James  Mill,  Essay  on  Government  (1825),  "We  have  seen  in 
what  manner  it  is  possible  to  prevent  in  the  Representatives  the  rise  of 
an  interest  different  from  that  of  the  parties  who  choose  them,  namely, 
by  giving  them  little  time  not  dependent  upon  the  will  of  those  parties" 
(p.  27). 


REPRESENTATIVE    GOVERNMENT     249 

are  now  shut  out,  would  also  make  it  possible  for  less 
worthy  motives  to  become  more  effective.  The  con- 
centration both  of  administrative  and  legislative  work 
in  the  hands  of  the  Cabinet,  while  it  tends  to  economy 
of  time  and  effort,  is  making  the  House  of  Commons 
yearly  a  less  interesting  place;  and  members  have  of 
late  often  expressed  to  me  a  real  anxiety  lest  the 
personnel  of  the  House  should  seriously  deteriorate. 

The  chief  immediate  danger  in  the  case  of  the  two 
older  parties  is  that,  owing  to  the  growing  expense  of 
electioneering  and  the  growing  effect  of  legislation  on 
commerce  and  finance,  an  increasing  proportion  of  the 
members  and  candidates  may  be  drawn  from  the  class 
of  "hustling"  company-promoters  and  financiers.  The 
Labour  Party,  on  the  other  hand,  can  now  draw  upon 
an  ample  supply  of  genuine  public  spirit,  and  its 
difficulties  in  this  respect  will  arise,  not  from  calcu- 
lated individual  selfishness,  but  from  the  social  and 
intellectual  environment  of  working-class  life.  During 
the  last  twenty  years  I  have  been  associated,  for  some 
years  continuously  and  afterwards  at  intervals,  with 
English  political  working  men.  They  had,  it  seemed 
to  me,  for  the  most  part  a  great  advantage  in  the  fact 
that  certain  real  things  of  life  were  real  to  them.  It 
as,  for  instance,  the  "class-conscious"  working  men 
who,  in  England  as  on  the  Continent,  are  the  chief 
safeguard  against  the  horrors  of  a  general  European 
war.  But  as  their  number  and  responsibility  increase 
they  will,  I  believe,  have  to  learn  some  rather  hard 


250       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


lessons  as  to  the  intellectual  conditions  of  represent- 
ative government  upon  a  large  scale.  -The  town  work- 
ing man  lives  in  a  world  in  which  it  is  very  dif- 
ficult for  him  to  choose  his  associates.  If  he  is  of 
an  expansive  temperament,  and  it  is  such  men  who 
become  politicians,  he  must  take  his  mates  in  the 
shop  and  his  neighbours  in  the  tenement  house  as  he 
finds  diem — and  he  sees  them  at  very  close  range. 
The  social  virtue  therefore  which  is  almost  a  necessity 
of  his  existence  is  a  good-humoured  tolerance  of  the 
defects  of  average  human  nature.  He  is  keenly  aware 
of  the  uncertainty  of  his  own  industrial  position, 
accustomed  to  give  and  receive  help,  and  very  unwill- 
ing to  "do"  any  man  "out  of  his  job.v  His  parents  and 
grandparents  read  very  little  and  he  was  brought  up 
in  a  home  with  few  books.  If.  as  he  grows  up.  he 
does  not  himself  read,  tilings  beyond  his  direct  obser- 
vation are  apt  to  be  rather  shadowy  for  him.  and  he 
is  easily  made  suspicious  of  that  which  he  does  not 
understand.  If.  on  the  other  hand,  he  takes  to  reading 
when  he  is  already  a  grown  man.  words  and  ideas  are 
apt  to  have  for  him  a  kind  of  abstract  and  sharply 
outlined  reality  in  a  region  far  removed  from  his  daily 
life. 

Now  the  first  virtue  required  in  government  is  the 
habit  of  realizing  that  things  whose  existence  we  infer 
from  reading  are  as  important  as  the  things  observed 
by  our  senses,  of  looking,  for  instance,  through  a  list 
of  candidates   for   an   appointment   and   weighing   the 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     251 

qualifications  of  the  man  whom  one  has  never  met  by 
the  same  standard  as  those  of  the  man  whom  one  has 
met,  and  liked  or  pitied,  the  day  before;  or  of  deciding 
on  an  improvement  with  complete  impartiality  as 
between  the  district  one  knows  of  only  on  the  map  and 
the  district  one  sees  every  morning.  If  a  representative 
elected  to  govern  a  large  area  allows  personal  acquaint- 
ance and  liking  to  influence  his  decisions,  his  acquaint- 
ance and  liking  will  be  schemed  for  and  exploited 
by  those  who  have  their  own  ends  to  gain.  The 
same  difficulty  arises  in  matters  of  discipline,  where 
the  interests  of  the  unknown  thousands  who  will 
suffer  from  the  inefficiency  of  an  official  have  to  be 
balanced  against  those  of  the  known  official  who  will 
suffer  by  being  punished  or  dismissed;  as  well  as  in  those 
numerous  cases  in  which  a  working  man  has  to  balance 
the  dimly  realized  interests  of  the  general  consumer 
against  his  intimate  sympathy  with  his  fellow-craftsmen. 
The  political  risk  arising  from  these  facts  is  not,  at 
present,  very  great  in  the  parliamentary  Labour  Party. 
The  working  men  who  have  been  sent  to  parliament  have 
been  hitherto,  as  a  rule,  men  of  picked  intelligence  and 
morale  and  of  considerable  political  experience.  But 
the  success  or  failure  of  any  scheme  aiming  at  social 
equity  will  depend  chiefly  on  its  administration  by  local 
bodies,  to  which  the  working  classes  must  necessarily 
send  men  of  less  exceptional  ability  and  experience.  I 
have  never  myself  served  on  an  elected  local  body  the 
majority  of  whose  members  were  weekly  wage  earners. 


252       HUMAN  NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


But  I  have  talked  with  men,  both  of  working-class  and 
middle-class  origin,  who  have  been  in  that  position. 
What  they  say  confirms  that  which  I  have  inferred  from 
my  own  observation,  that  on  such  a  body  one  finds  a 
high  level  of  enthusiasm,  of  sympathy,  and  of  readiness 
to  work,  combined  with  a  difficulty  in  maintaining  a 
sufficiently  rigorous  standard  in  dealing  with  sectional 
interests  and  official  discipline. 

One  is  told  that  on  such  a  body  many  members  feel 
it  difficult  to  realize  that  the  way  in  which  a  well  inten- 
tioned  man  may  deal  with  his  own  personal  expenditure, 
his  continued  patronage,  for  instance,  of  a  rather  in- 
efficient tradesman  because  he  has  a  large  family,  or 
his  refusal  to  contest  an  account  from  a  dislike  of  imput- 
ing bad  motives,  is  fatal  if  applied  in  the  expenditure 
of  the  large  sums  entrusted  to  a  public  body.     Some- 
times there  are  even,  one  learns,  indications  of  that  good- 
humoured  and  not  ill-meant  laxity  in  expending  public 
money  which  has  had  such  disastrous  results  in  America, 
and  which  lends  itself  so  easily  to  exploitation  by  those 
in  whom  the  habit  of  giving  and  taking  personal  favours 
has  hardened  into  systematic  fraud.     When  one  of  the 
West  Ham  Guardians,  two  years  ago,  committed  suicide 
on  being  charged  with  corruption,  the  Star  sent  down  a 
representative  who  filled  a  column  with  the  news.     "His 
death,"   we  are  told,   "has   robbed   the   district  of   an 
indefatigable  public  worker.     County  Council,   Board 
of  Guardians,   and  Liberal  interests   all  occupied  his 
leisure  time."     "One  of  his  friends"  is  described  as 


REPRESENTATIVE   GOVERNMENT     253 

saying  to  the  Star  reporter,  "You  do  not  need  to  go  far 
to  learn  of  his  big-souled  geniality.  The  poor  folks  of 
the  workhouse  will  miss  him  badly"1  When  one  has 
waded  through  masses  of  evidence  pn  American  muni- 
cipal corruption,  that  phrase  about  "big-souled  geni- 
ality" makes  one  shudder. 

The  early  history  of  the  co-operative  and  trade-union 
movements  in  England  is  full  of  pathetic  instances  of 
this  kind  of  failure,  and  both  movements  show  how  a 
new  and  more  stringent  ideal  may  be  slowly  built  up. 
Such  an  ideal  will  not  come  of  itself  without  an  effort, 
and  must  be  part  of  the  conscious  organized  thought  of 
each  generation  if  it  is  to  be  permanently  effective. 

These  difficulties  have  in  the  past  been  mainly  pointed 
out  by  the  opponents  of  democracy.  But  if  democracy 
is  to  succeed  they  must  be  frankly  considered  by  the 
democrats  themselves;  just  as  it  is  the  engineer  who  is 
trying  to  build  the  bridge,  and  not  the  ferry-owner,  who 
is  against  any  bridge  at  all,  whose  duty  it  is  to  calculate 
the  strain  which  the  materials  will  stand.  The  engineer, 
when  he  wishes  to  increase  the  margin  of  safety  in  his 
plans,  treats  as  factors  in  the  same  quantitative  problem 
both  the  chemical  expedients  by  which  he  can  strengthen 
his  materials  and  the  structural  changes  by  which  the 
strain  on  those  materials  can  be  diminished.  So  those 
who  would  increase  the  margin  of  safety  in  our  dem- 
ocracy must  estimate,  with  no  desire  except  to  arrive 
at  truth,  both  the  degree  to  which  the  political  strength 

1  Star,  November  28,  1906. 


254       HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

of  the  individual  citizen  can,  in  any  given  time,  be 
actually  increased  by  moral  and  educational  changes, 
and  the  possibility  of  preserving  or  extending  or  invent- 
ing such  elements  in  the  structure  of  democracy  as  may 
prevent  the  demand  upon  him  being  too  great  for  his 
strength. 


CHAPTER    III 

OFFICIAL   THOUGHT 

It  is  obvious,  however,  that  the  persons  elected  under 
any  conceivable  system  of  representation  cannot  do  the 
whole  work  of  government  themselves. 

If  all  elections  are  held  in  single  member  constitu- 
encies of  a  size  sufficient  to  secure  a  good  supply  of 
candidates;  if  the  number  of  elections  is  such  as  to  allow 
the  political  workers  a  proper  interval  for  rest  and 
reflection  between  the  campaigns;  if  each  elected  body 
has  an  area  large  enough  for  effective  administration, 
a  number  of  members  sufficient  for  committee  work  and 
not  too  large  for  debate,  and  duties  sufficiently  important 
to  justify  the  effort  and  expense  of  a  contest;  then 
one  may  take  about  twenty-three  thousand  as  the  best 
number  of  men  and  women  to  be  elected  by  the  existing 
population  of  the  United  Kingdom — or  rather  less  than 
one  to  every  two  thousand  of  the  population.1 

This    proportion    depends    mainly    on    facts    in    the 

1  I  arrive  at  this  figure  by  dividing  the  United  Kingdom  into  single 
member  parliamentary  constituencies,  averaging  100,000  in  population, 
which  gives  a  House  of  Commons  of  440 — a  more  convenient  number  than 
the  existing  670.  I  take  the  same  unit  of  100.000  for  the  average  munici- 
pal area.  Large  towns  would  contain  several  parliamentary  constituen- 
cies, and  small  towns  would,  as  at  present,  be  separate  municipal  areas, 
although  only  part  of  a  parliamentary  constituency.  I  allow  one  local 
council  of  50  on  the  average  to  each  municipal  area. 

255 


256       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 


psychology  of  the  electors,  which  will  change  very  slowly 
if  they  change  at  all.  At  present  the  amount  of  work 
to  be  done  in  the  way  of  government  is  rapidly  increas- 
ing, and  seems  likely  to  continue  to  increase.  If  so, 
the  number  of  elected  persons  available  for  each  unit 
of  work  must  tend  to  decrease.  The  number  of  persons 
now  elected  in  the  United  Kingdom  (including,  for 
instance,  the  Parish  Councillors  of  rural  parishes,  and 
the  Common  Council  of  the  City  of  London)  is,  of  course, 
larger  than  my  estimate,  though  it  has  been  greatly 
diminished  by  the  Acts  of  1888,  1894,  and  1902. 
Owing,  however,  to  the  fact  that  areas  and  powers  are 
still  somewhat  uneconomically  distributed  it  represents 
a  smaller  actual  working  power  than  would  be  given 
by  the  plan  which  I  suggest. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  number  of  persons  (excluding 
the  Army  and  Navy)  given  in  the  Census  Returns  of 
1901  as  professionally  employed  in  the  central  and  local 
government  of  the  United  Kingdom  was  161,000.  This 
number  has  certainly  grown  since  1901  at  an  increasing 
rate,  and  consists  of  persons  who  give  on  an  average  at 
least  four  times  as  many  hours  a  week  to  their  work 
as  can  be  expected  from  the  average  elected  member. 

What  ought  to  be  the  relation  between  these  two  bodies, 
of  twenty-three  thousand  elected,  and  say,  two  hundred 
thousand  non-elected  persons?  To  begin  with,  ought 
the  elected  members  to  be  free  to  appoint  the  non-elected 
officials  as  they  like?  Most  American  politicians  of 
Andrew  Jackson's  time,  and  a  large  number  of  American 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  257 

» 

politicians  to-day,  would  hold,  for  instance,  as  a  direct 
corollary  from  democratic  principles,  that  the  elected 
congressman  or  senator  for  a  district  or  State  has  a 
right  to  nominate  the  local  federal  officials.  There 
may,  he  would  admit,  be  some  risk  in  that  method, 
but  the  risk,  he  would  argue,  is  one  involved  in  the  whole 
scheme  of  democracy,  and  the  advantages  of  democracy 
as  a  whole  are  greater  than  its  disadvantages. 

Our  political  logic  in  England  has  never  been  so 
elementary  as  that  of  the  Americans,  nor  has  our  faith 
in  it  been  so  unflinching.  Most  Englishmen,  therefore, 
have  no  feeling  of  disloyalty  to  the  democratic  idea  in 
admitting  that  it  is  not  safe  to  allow  the  efficiency  of 
officials  to  depend  upon  the  personal  character  of 
individual  representatives.  At  the  General  Election 
of  1906  there  were  at  least  two  English  con- 
stituencies (one  Liberal  and  the  other  Conservative) 
which  returned  candidates  whose  personal  unfitness  had 
been  to  most  men's  minds  proved  by  evidence  given  in 
the  law  courts.  Neither  constituency  was  markedly 
unlike  the  average  in  any  respect.  The  facts  were  well 
known,  and  in  each  case  an  attempt  was  made  by  a  few 
public-spirited  voters  to  split  the  party  vote,  but  both 
candidates  were  successful  by  large  majorities.  The 
Borough  of  Croydon  stands,  socially  and  intellectually, 
well  above  the  average,  but  Mr.  Jabez  Balfour  repres- 
ented Croydon  for  many  years,  until  he  was  sentenced 
to  penal  servitude  for  fraud.  No  one  in  any  of  these 
three  cases  would  have  desired  that  the  sitting  member 


258       HUMAN   NATURE    IN   POLITICS 

should  appoint,  say,  the  postmasters,  or  collectors  of 
Inland  Revenue  for  his  constituency. 

But  though  the  case  against  the  appointment  of 
officials  by  individual  representatives  is  clear,  the 
question  of  the  part  which  should  be  taken  by  any  elected 
body  as  a  whole  in  appointing  the  officials  who  serve 
under  it  is  much  more  difficult,  and  cannot  be  discussed 
without  considering  what  are  to  be  the  relative  functions 
of  the  officials  and  the  representatives  after  the  appoint- 
ment has  taken  place.  Do  we  aim  at  making  election 
in  fact  as  well  as  in  constitutional  theory  the  sole  base 
of  political  authority,  or  do  we  desire  that  the  non-elected 
officials  shall  exert  some  amount  of  independent 
influence? 

The  fact  that  most  Englishmen,  in  spite  of  their 
traditional  fear  of  bureaucracy,  would  now  accept  the 
second  of  these  alternatives,  is  one  of  the  most  striking 
results  of  our  experience  in  the  working  of  democracy. 
We  see  that  the  evidence  on  which  the  verdict  at  an 
election  must  be  given  is  becoming  every  year  more 
difficult  to  collect  and  present,  and  further  removed  from 
the  direct  observation  of  the  voters.  We  are  afraid  of 
being  entirely  dependent  on  partisan  newspapers  or 
election  leaflets  for  our  knowledge,  and  we  have  there- 
fore come  to  value,  even  if  for  that  reason  only,  the 
existence  of  a  responsible  and  more  or  less  independent 
Civil  Service.  It  is  difficult  to  realize  how  short  a  time 
it  is  since  questions  for  which  we  now  rely  entirely  on 
official  statistics  were  discussed  by  the  ordinary  political 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  259 

methods  of  agitation  and  advocacyj  In  the  earlier 
years  of  George  the  Third's  reign,  at  a  time  when  pop- 
ulation in  England  was,  as  we  now  know,  rising  with 
unprecedented  rapidity,  the  question  of  fact  whether 
it  was  rising  or  falling  led  to  embittered  political  con- 
troversy.1 In  the  spring  of  1830  the  House  of  Commons 
gave  three  nights  to  a  confused  party  debate  on  the  state 
of  the  country.  The  Whigs  argued  that  distress  was 
general,  and  the  Tories  (who  were,  as  it  happened,  right) 
that  it  was  local."  In  1798  or  1830  the  "public"  who 
could  take  part  in  such  discussions  numbered  perhaps 
fifty  thousand  at  the  most.  At  least  ten  million  people 
must,  since  1903,  have  taken  part  in  the  present  Tariff 
Reform  controversy;  and  that  controversy  would  have 
degenerated  into  mere  Bedlam  if  it  had  not  been  for 
the  existence  of  the  Board  of  Trade  Returns,  with  whose 
figures  both  sides  had  at  least  to  appear  to  square  their 
anrumenti. 

If  official  figures  did  not  exist  in  England,  or  if  they 
did  not  possess  or  deserve  authority,  it  is  difficult  to 
estimate  the  degree  of  political  harm  which  could  be 
done  in  a  few  years  by  an  interested  and  deliberately 
dishonest  agitation  on  some  question  too  technical  for 
the  personal  judgment  of  the  ordinary  voter.  Suppose, 
for  instance,  that  our  Civil  Service  were  either  notori- 
ously inefficient  or  believed  to  be  dominated  by  party 
influence,  and  that  an  organized  and  fraudulent  "cur- 

1  Bonar's  Mai  thus,  chap.  vii. 

2  Hansard,  Feb.  4,  5,  6,  1830. 


260        HI    MAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

rency  agitation'1  Bhould  suddenly  spring  up.  A  power- 
ful press  syndicate  brings  out  a  series  of  well-advertised 
articles  declaring  thai  the  privileges  ol  the  Bank  of 
England  and  the  law  a-  to  the  gold  reserve  are  "stran- 
gling British  Industry."  The  contents  bills  of  fifty 
newspapers  denounce  every  day  the  "monopolists"  and 
the  "gold-bugs,"  the  "lies  and  shams"  of  the  Bank 
Returns,  and  the  "paid  perjurers  of  Somerset  House." 
The  group  of  financier-  who  control  the  syndicate  stand 
to  win  enormous  Bums  b)  the  creation  of  a  more  "elastic" 
currency,  and  subscribe  largely  to  a  Free  Money  League 
which  include-  a  few  sincere  paper-money  theorists  who 
have  been  soured  by  the  contempt  of  the  professional 
economists.  A  vigorous  and  well-known  member  of 
parliament — a  not  very  reputable  aristocrat  perhaps, 
or  some  one  loosely  connected  with  the  Labor  movement 
— whom  everybody  has  hitherto  feared  and  no  one  quite 
trusted,  sees  his  opportunity.  He  puts  himself  at  the 
head  of  the  movement,  denounces  the  "fossils"  and 
"superior  persons"  who  at  present  lead  Conservative 
and  Liberal  and  Labour  parties  alike,  and,  with  the  help 
of  the  press  syndicate  and  the  subscription  fund  of  the 
"Free  Money  League,"  begins  to  capture  the  local  assoc- 
iations, and  through  them  the  central  office  of  the  party 
which  is  for  die  moment  in  opposition. 

Can  any  one  be  sure  that  such  a  campaign,  if  it  were 
opposed  only  by  counter-electioneering,  might  not  suc- 
ceed, even  although  its  proposals  were  wholly  fraudulent, 
and  its  leaders  so  ignorant  or  so  criminal  that  they  could 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  261 

only  conic  into  power  by  discrediting  two-thirds  of  the 
honest  politicians  in  the  country,  and  by  replacing  them 
with  "hustlers"  and  "boodlers"  and  "grafters,"  and  the 
other  species  for  whom  American  political  science  has 
provided  names?  How  is  the  ordinary  voter — a  market- 
gardener,  or  a  gas-stoker,  or  a  water-colour  painter — to 
distinguish  by  the  help  of  hi-  own  knowledge  and 
reasoning  power  between  the  various  appeal-  made  to 
him  by  the  "Reformers"  and  the  "Safe  Money  Men"'  as 
to  the  right  proportion  of  the  gold  reserve  to  the  note 
issue— the  "ten  per  cent.'1  on  the  blue  posters  and  the 
"cent,  per  cent.""  on  the  yellow  ?  Nor  will  his  conscience 
be  a  safer  guide  than  his  judgment.  A  "Christian 
Service  Wing"  of  the  Free  Money  League  may  be 
formed,  and  his  conscience  may  be  roused  by  a  white- 
cravatted  orator  intoxicated  by  his  own  eloquence  into 
something  like  sincerity,  who  borrow-  that  phrase  about 
"Humanity  crucified  upon  a  cross  of  gold"'  which  Mr. 
W.  J.  Bryan  borrowed  a  dozen  years  ago  from  some  one 
else.  In  an  optimistic  mood  one  might  rely  on  the  subtle 
network  of  confidence  by  which  each  man  trusts,  on  sub- 
jects outside  his  own  knowledge,  some  honest  and  better- 
informed  neighbour,  who  again  trusts  at  several  removes 
the  trained  thinker.  But  does  such  a  personal  network 
exist  in  our  vast  delocalized  urban  populations? 

It  is  the  vague  apprehension  of  such  dangers,  quite 
as  much  as  the  merely  selfish  fears  of  the  privileged 
classes,  which  preserves  in  Europe  the  relics  of  past 
systems  of  non-elective  government,  the  House  of  Lords, 


262       HUMAN  NATURE  IN  POLITICS 

for  instance,  ill  England,  and  the  Monarchy  in  Italy 
or  Norway.  Men  feel  that  a  second  base  in  politics 
is  required,  consisting  of  persons  independent  of  tin- 
tactics  by  which  electoral  opinion  is  formed  and  legally 
entitled  to  make  themselves  heard.  But  political 
authority  founded  on  hereditj  or  wealth  is  not  in  fact 
protected  from  the  interested  manipulation  of  opinion 
and  feeling.  The  American  Senate,  which  ha-  come  to 
he  representative  of  wealth,  i-  already  absorbed  by  that 
financial  power  which  depends  for  it-  existence  <>n 
manufactured   opinion;   and   our   House  of   Lords   is 

rapidly  tending  in  the  same  direction.  From  the 
beginning  of  history  it  has  been  found  easier  for  any- 
skilled  politician  who  set  hi-  mind  to  it,  to  control  the 
opinions  of  a  hereditary  monarch  than  those  of  a 
crowd. 

The  real  "Second  Chamber,"  the  real  "constitutional 
check"'  in  England,  i-  provided,  not  by  the  House  of 
Lords  or  the  Monarchy,  hut  by  the  existence  of  a  per- 
manent Civil  Service,  appointed  on  a  system  indepen- 
dent of  the  opinion  or  desires  of  any  politician,  and 
holding  office  during  good  behaviour.  If  such  a  service 
were,  as  it  is  in  Russia  and  to  a  large  extent  in  India, 
a  sovereign  power,  it  would  itself,  as  I  argued  in  the 
last  chapter,  have  to  cultivate  the  art  of  manipulating 
opinion.  But  the  English  Civil  servants  in  their  pre- 
sent position  have  the  right  and  duty  of  making  their 
voice  heard,  without  the  necessity  of  making  their  will, 
by  fair  means  or  foul,  prevail. 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  263 

The  creation  of  this  Service  was  the  one  great 
political  invention  in  nineteenth-century  England,  and 
like  oilier  inventions  it  was  worked  out  under  the  pres- 
sure of  an  urgent  practical  problem.  The  method  of 
appointing  the  officials  of  the  East  India  Company  had 
I  een  a  critical  question  in  English  politics  since  1783. 
By  that  time  it  had  already  become  clear  that  we  could 
not  permanently  allow  the  appointment  of  the  rulers 
of  a  great  empire  kept  in  existence  by  the  English  fleet 
and  army  to  depend  upon  the  irresponsible  favour  of 
ipany's  directors.  Charles  James  Fox  in  1783, 
with  his  usual  heedlessness,  proposed  to  cut  the  knot  by 
making  Indian  appointments,  in  effect,  part  of  the 
ordinary  system  of  parliamentary  patronage;  and  he 
and  Lord  North  wen-  beaten  OVCT  their  India  Bill,  not 
only  because  George  the  Third  was  obstinate  and  un- 
scrupulous, but  because  men  fell  the  enormous  political 
dangers  involved  in  their  proposal.     The  question,  in 

fact,  could  onk  be  solved  by  a  new  invention.  The 
expedient  of  administering  an  oath  to  the  Directors 
that  they  would  make  their  requirements  honestly,  proved 
to  be  useless,  and  the  requirement-  that  the  nominees 
oi  the  Directors  should  submit  to  a  Bpecia]  training  at 
Hayleybury,  though  more  effective,  left  the  main  evil 
of  patronage  untouched. 

\-  early,  therefore,  as  1833,  the  Government  Bill 
introduced  \>\  Macaulay  for  the  renewal  and  revision 
of  the  Company's  charter  contained  a  clause  providing 
that  East   India  cadetships  should  be  thrown   open   to 


264       H  l   MAN    \  \  I  l   RE    IN    P01  I  1  ICS 

competition.1  For  the  time  the  influence  of  the  D 
tors  wbb  Bufficienl  to  prevenl  bo  greal  a  change  from 
being  effected,  bul  in  1853,  on  a  furthei  renewal  of  the 
Charter,  the  Bystem  of  competition  icas  definitely 
adopted,  and  the  first  open  examination  for  cadetships 
took  place  in  1855. 

In  the  meantime  Sir  Charles  Trevelyan,  a  distin- 
guished Indian  Civilian  who  had  married  Macaulay's 
Bister,  had  been  asked  to  inquire,  with  the  help  <>f 
Sir  Stafford  \orthcote,  into  the  method  of  appointment 
in  the  Hume  Civil   Service.     His   report   appeared   in 

the   Bpring  of    18")  1.     ami    i-  one  of  the  ablest   of  those 
State    Papers   which    have   done    BO   much    to   mould   the 

English   constitution   during  the   Last   two   generations. 
It   Bhowed  the  intolerable  effects  on  the  personnel  of 

the  existing  Service  of  the  system  by  which  the  Patronage 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  distributed  appointments  in 

the  national  Civil  Service  anions  those  members  of 
parliament  whose  votes  were  to  be  influenced  or  re- 
warded, and  it  proposed  that  all  posts  requiring  in- 
tellectual qualifications  should  be  thrown  open  to  those 
young  men  of  good  character  who  succeeded  at  a  com- 
petitive examination  in  the  subjects  which  then  consti- 
tuted the  education  of  a  gentleman. 
But  to  propose  that  members  of  parliament  should 

1  It  would  be  interesting  if  Lord  Morley,  now  that  he  has  access  to  the 
records  of  the  East  India  House,  would  tell  us  the  true  intellectual  his- 
tory of  this  far-reaching  suggestion.  For  the  facts  as  now  known,  cf.  A. 
L.  Lowell,  Colonial  Civil  Service,  pp.  243-256. 

2  Reports  and  Papers  on  the  Civil  Service,  1854-5. 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  265 

give  up  their  own  patronage  was  a  very  different  thing 
them  to  take  away  the  patronage  of  the 
East  India  Company.  Sir  Charles  Trevelyan,  there- 
fore,  before  publishing  hi-  proposal,  sent  it  round  to  a 
number  of  distinguished  persons  hoth  inside  and  out- 
side  the  Government  Bervice,  and  printed  their  very 
frank  replies  in  an  appendix. 

Most  of  lii-  correspondents  thought  that  the  idea  was 
hopelessly  impracticable.  It  seemed  like  the  intrusion 
into  the  world  of  politic-  of  a  scheme  of  cause  and  effect 
derived  from  another  universe  -as  ii"  our  Bhould  propose 
to  the  Stork  Exchange  that  the  day's  prices  Bhould  be 
fixed  1>\  prayer  and  the  casting  <>f  l<>t~.  Lingen,  for 
instance,  the  permanent  head  of  the  Education  Office, 
wn.tr  "considering  that,  a-  a  matter  of  fact,  patronage 
is  one  element  oi  power,  and  not  by  any  means  an  un- 
real one;  considering  the  long  and  inestimably  valuable 
habituation  of  the  people  of  this  country  to  political 
contests  in  which  the  share  of  office  .  .  .  reckons  among 
the  legitimate  prizes  of  war;  considering  that  socially 
and  in  the  business  of  life,  as  well  a-  in  Downing  Strrrt. 
rank  and  wealth  (as  a  fart,  and  whether  we  like  it  or 
not)  bold  the  key-  of  many  things,  and  that  our  modes 
of  thinking  and  acting  proceed,  in  a  thousand  ways, 
upon  this  supposition,  considering  all  these  things,  I 
should  hesitate  h>n.!_r  before  I  advised  such  a  revolution 
of  the  Civil  Service  as  that  proposed  by  yourself  and 
Sir   Stafford   Northcote."1     Sir  James  Stephen   of  the 

1  Reports  and  Papers  on  the  Civil  Service,  pp.  104,  105. 


266       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


Colonial  Office  put  it  more  bluntly,  "The  world  we  live 
in  is  not,  I  think,  half  moralized  enough  foi  the  accept- 
ance of  Bucfa  a  -eh. -mi-  of  stern  morality  as  this. 
When,  a  fevi  years  later,  competition  foi  commissions 
in  the  Indian  army  was  discussed,  Queen  V  ictoria  (or 
Prince  Albert  through  her)  objected  that  it  "reduced 
the  sovereign  to  a  mere  signing  machine. 

In  1870,  however,  Bixteen  years  after  Trevelyan'a 
Report,  Gladstone  established  open  competition  through- 
out the  English  Civil  Service,  by  an  ordei  in  Council 
whi.h  was  practically  uncriticized  and  unopposed;  and 
the  parliamentary  government  of  England  in  one  of  its 
most  important  functions  did  in  fact  reduce  itself  "to  a 
mere  signing  maehine. 

The  causes  of  the  change  in  the  political  atmosphere 
which  made  this  possible  constitute  one  of  the  most 
interesting  problems  in  English  history.  One  cause  is 
obvious.  In  1867  Lord  Derby's  Reform  Act  had 
suddenly  transferred  the  ultimate  control  of  the  House 
of  Commons  from  the  "ten  pound  householders"  in  the 
boroughs  to  the  working  men.  The  old  "governing 
classes"  may  well  have  felt  that  the  patronage  which 
they  could  not  much  longer  retain  would  be  safer  in  the 
hands  of  an  independent  Civil  Service  Commission, 
interpreting,  like  a  blinded  figure  of  Justice,  the  verdict 
of  Nature,  than  in  those  of  the  dreaded  "caucuses," 
which  Mr.  Schnadhorst  was  already  organizing. 

1  Reports  and  papers  on  the  Civil  Service,  p.  78. 

*Life  of  Queen  Victoria,  vol.  iii,  p.  377   (July  29,  1858). 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  267 

But  one  seems  to  detect  a  deeper  cause  of  change  than 
the  mere  transference  of  voting  power.  The  fifteen 
years  from  the  Crimean  War  to  1870  were  in  England 
a  period  of  wide  mental  activity,  during  which  the 
conclusions  of  a  few  penetrating  thinkers  like  Darwin 
or  Newman  were  discussed  and  popularized  by  a  crowd 
of  magazine  writers  and  preachers  and  poets.  The 
conception  was  gaining  ground  that  it  was  upon  serious 
and  continued  thought  and  not  upon  opinion  that  1 1 1  *  - 
power  to  carrj  out  our  purposes,  whether  in  politics  or 
elsewhere,  must  ultimately  depend. 

Carlyle  in  L850  had  asked  whether  "democracy  once 
modelled  into  suffrages,  furnished  with  ballot-boxes 
and  Buch-like,  will  itself  accomplish  the  salutary 
universal  change  from  Delusive  to  Real,'1  and  had 
answered,  "Your  ship  cannot  double  Cape  Horn  by  its 
llent  plan-  of  voting.  Tne  ship  may  vote  this  and 
that,  above  decks  and  below,  in  the  most  harmonious 
exquisitely  constitutional  manner:  the  ship,  to  get  round 
Cape  Horn,  will  find  a  Bet  of  conditions  already  voted 
for,  and  fixed  with  adamantine  rigour  by  the  ancient 
Elemental  Powers,  who  are  entirely  careless  how  you 
vote.  If  you  can.  by  voting  <>r  without  voting,  ascertain 
those  conditions,  and  valiantly  conform  to  them,  vou  will 
get  round  the  Cape:  if  you  cannot — the  ruffian  Winds 
will  blow  you  ever  back  again." 

By   1870  Carlyle's  lesson  was  already  well  started 

1  Latter  Day  Pamphlets,  No.   1,   The  Present  Time.      (Chapman  and 
Hall,  1894,  pp.  12  and  14.) 


268        HI    MAN    NAT1    RE    IN    POLITICS 

on  it-  course  from  paradox  to  platitude.  Tin-  most 
important  Bingle  influence  in  that  course  had  been  the 
growth  of  Natural  Science.  It  was,  for  in-tance.  in  1!!7() 
thai  Huxley's  "l.a\  Sermons"  were  collected  and  pub- 
lished. People  who  could  not  in  1M.~>()  understand  Car- 
lyle's  distinction  between  the  Delusive  and  the  Real, 
could  not  help  understanding  Huxley's  comparison  of 
life  ami  death  to  a  game  of  chess  with  an  unseen  oppo- 
nent who  never  makes  a  mistake.1  Ind  Huxley's  im- 
personal Science  seemed  a  more  present  aid  in  the  voy- 
age round  Cape  Horn  than  Carlyle's  personal  and  impos- 

silde  I  lero. 

But  the  invention  of  a  competitive  Civil  Service,  when 

it  had  once  been  made  and  adopted,  dropped  from  the 
region  of  severe  and  difficult  thought  in  which  it  ori- 
ginated, and  took  its  place  in  our  habitual  political 
psychology.  We  now  half-consciously  conceive  of  the 
Civil  Service  as  an  unchanging  fact  whose  good  and  had 
points  are  to  be  taken  or  left  as  a  whole.  Open 
competition  has  by  the  same  process  become  a  "prin- 
ciple," conceived  of  as  applying  to  those  cases  to  which 
it  has  been  in  fact  applied,  and  to  no  others.  What  is 
therefore  for  the  moment  most  needed,  if  we  are  to  think 
fruitfully  on  the  subject,  is  that  we  should  in  our  own 
minds  break  up  this  fact,  and  return  to  the  world  of 
infinite  possible  variations.  We  must  think  of  the  ex- 
pedient of  competition  itself  as  varying  in  a  thousand 

1  Lay  Sermons,  p.  31,  "A  Liberal  Education"  (1868). 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  269 

different  directions,  and  shading  by  imperceptible  grad- 
ations into  other  methods  of  appointment;  and  of  the 
posts  offered  for  competition  as  differing  each  from 
all  the  rest,  as  overlapping  those  posts  for  which  compe- 
tition in  some  form  is  suitable  though  it  has  not  yet 
been  tried,  and  as  touching,  at  the  marginal  point  on 
their  curve,  those  posts  for  which  competition  is  un- 
suitable. 

Directly  we  begin  this  process  one  fact  becomes  ob- 
vious. There  is  oo  reaw  n  why  the  same  sj  item  should 
not  be  applied  to  the  appointment  of  the  officials  of 
the  local  as  to  those  of  the  central  government.  It 
IS  an  amazing  instance  of  the  intellectual  inertia  of 
the  English  people  that  we  have  never  seriously  con- 
Bidered  this  point.  In  America  the  term  Civil  Service 
is  applied  equally  to  both  groups  of  office-,  and  "Civil 

Service  principle-"'  are  undent 1   to  cover  State  and 

Municipal  a-  well  as  Federal  appointment-.  The 
separation  of  the  t\so  systems  in  our  minds  may, 
indeed,  be  largely  due  to  the  mere  accident  that  from 
historical  reasons  we  call  them  by  different  names. 
As  it  i-,  the  local  authorities  are  (with  the  exception 
that  certain  qualifications  are  required  for  teachers  and 
medical  officers)  left  free  to  do  as  they  will  in  making 
appointments.  Perhaps  half  a  dozen  Metropolitan 
and  provincial  local  bodies  have  adopted  timid  and 
limited  schemes  of  open  competition.  But  in  all  other 
cases  the  local  civil  servants,  who  are  already  probably 


270       II  l   MAN    NAT1   RE    IN    POLITICS 


as  numerous  a-  those  of  the  centra]  government,1  ire 
appointed  under  conditions  which,  it'  the  Government 

chose  to  create  a  (a>mini»ion  of  Inquiry,  would  prob- 
ably be  Found  to  have  reproduced  many  of  the  evils  that 
existed  in  the  patronage  of  the  centra]  government  before 
L855. 

It  would  not,  of  course,  be  possible  to  appoint  a  sepa- 
rate bodj  of  Civil  Service  Commissioners  to  hold  a  w  pa- 
rate  examination  for  each  locality,  and  difficulties  would 
arise  from  the  selection  of  officials  by  a  body  responsible 
only  to  the  central  government,  and  out  of  touch  with 
the  local  body  which  controls,  pays,  and  promotes 
them  when  appointed.  Bui  Bimiliar  difficulties  have 
been  obviated  by  American  Civil  Service  Reformers, 
and  a  few  days1  bard  thinking  would  Buffice  to  adapt  the 
-\-tem  to  English  local  condition-. 

One  object  aimed  at  by  the  creation  of  a  competitive 
Civil  Service  for  the  central  government  in  England  was 
the  prevention  of  corruption.  It  was  made  more 
difficult  for  representatives  and  officials  to  conspire  to- 
gether in  order  to  defraud  the  public,  when  the  official 
ceased  to  owe  his  appointment  to  the  representative. 
If  an  English  member  of  parliament  desired  now  to  make 
money  out  of  his  position,  he  would  have  to  corrupt  a 
whole  series  of  officials  in  no  way  dependent  on  his 
favour,  who  perhaps  intensely  dislike  the  human  type  to 

1  The  figures  in  the  census  of  1901  were— National,  90,000;  Local,  71, 
000.  But  the  local  officials  since  then  have,  I  believe,  increased  much 
more  rapidly  than  the  national. 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  271 

which  he  belongs,  and  who  would  be  condemned  to  dis- 
grace or  imprisonment  yean  after  he  had  lost  his  seat  if 
some  record  of  their  joint  misdoing  were  unearthed. 

This  precaution  against  corruption  is  needed  even 
more  clearly  under  the  conditions  of  local  government. 
The  expenditure  of  local  bodies  in  the  United  Kingdom 
is  already  much  larger  than  that  of  the  central  State, 
and  is  increasing  at  an  enormously  greater  rate,  while 
die  fan  that  most  of  the  money  is  spent  locally,  and  in 
comparatively  small  sums,  makes  fraud  easier.  Eng- 
lish municipal  lit'.-  is,  I  believe,  On  the  whole  pure,  but 
fraud  does  occur,  and  is  encouraged  by  the  close 
connection  that  may  exist  between  the  officials  and  the 
representative-.  A  needy  or  thick-skinned  urban  coun- 
cillor or  guardian  ma\  at  any  moment  tempt,  or  be 
tempted,  by  a  poor  relation  who  helped  him  at  his  elec- 
tion, and  for  whom  (perhaps  as  the  result  of  s  tacit  un- 
derstanding that  Bimilar  favours  should  be  allowed  to 
hifl  colleagues),  he  obtained  a  municipal  post 

The  railway  companies,  again,  in  England  are  coming 
every  year  more  and  more  under  State  control,  hut  no 
statesman  has  ever  attempted  to  secure  in  their  case,  as 
was  done  in  the  case  of  the  East  India  Company  a  cen- 
turv  ago,  some  reasonable  standard  of  purity  and  im- 
partiality in  appointments  and  promotion.  Some  few 
railways  have  systems  of  competition  for  boy  clerks, 
even  more  inadequate  than  those  carried  on  by  munici- 
palities; but  one  is  told  that  under  most  of  the  companies 
both  appointment  and  promotion  may  be  influenced  by 


272       HUMAN  NATURE  IN    I'ol.ITICS 

the  favour  of  directors  <>r  Large  shareholder^.  We 
regulate  the  minutiae  of  coupling  and  signalling  <>n  the 
railways,  but  do  not  realize  thai  tin-  Baferj  of  the  public 
depends  even  more  direct!]  upon  their  systems  "I  pa« 
tronage. 

How  far  this  principle  should  be  extended,  and  bom 
far,  for  instance,  it  would  be  possible  t<>  prevent  the 
head  of  a  greal  private  firm  from  ruining  ball  a  country 
side  1>\  leaving  the  management  <>l  his  business  to  a 
hopelessly  incompetent  relation,  is  a  question  which 
depends,  among  other  things,  upon  tin-  powers  of  poli- 
tical invention  which  maj  be  developed  by  collectivisl 
thinkers  in  the  next  fifty  years. 

We  must  meanwhile  cease  to  treat  the  existing  system 
of  competition  by  the  basty  writing  of  answers  to  un- 
expected  examination   questions   as   an    unchangeable 

entity.      That  system  lias  certain   very   real   advantages. 

It   is  felt  by  the  candidates  and  their  relations  to  be 

"fair."1  It  reveals  facts  about  the  relative  powers  of  the 
candidates  in  some  important  intellectual  qualities 
which  no  testimonials  would  indicate,  and  which  are 
often  unknown,  till  tested,  to  the  candidates  themselves. 
But  if  the  sphere  of  independent  selection  is  to  be  widely 
extended,  greater  variety  must  be  introduced  into  its 
methods.  In  this  respect  invention  has  stood  still  in 
England  since  the  publication  of  Sir  Charles  Trevelyan's 
Report  in  1855.  Some  slight  modifications  have  taken 
place  in  the  subjects  chosen  for  examination,  but  the 
enormous   changes   in   English   educational   conditions 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  273 

during  the  last  half  century  have  been  for  the  most  part 
ignored.  It  is  still  assumed  that  young  Englishmen  con- 
sist of  a  small  minority  who  have  received  the  nearly 
uniform  "education  of  a  gentleman,"  and  a  large  major- 
ity who  have  received  no  intellectual  training  at  all.  The 
spread  of  varied  types  of  secondary  schools,  the  increas- 
ing specialization  of  higher  education,  and  the  experi- 
ence which  all  the  univer-iti«-  of  the  world  have  accumu- 
lated as  to  the  possibility  of  testing  the  genuineness  and 
intellectual  quality  <>i  "post  graduate"  theses  have  had 
little  or  no  effect. 

Tin-  Playfair  Commission  of  L875  found  thai  a  few 
women  were  employed  for  strictly  subordinate  work 
in  the  Post  Office.  Sine-  then  female  typewriters  and 
a  few  better-paid  women  have  been  introduced  into 
other  offices  in  accordance  \sith  tin*  ea-ual  impulses 
of  this  or  that  parliamentary  <>r  permanent  chief;  hut 
no  systematic  attempt  has  been  made  to  enrich  tin- 
thinking  power  of  the  State  by  using  the  trained  and 
patient  intellects  of  the  women  who  graduate  each 
in  the  newer,  and  "quality  by  examination  to  graduate," 
in  the  older  Universities. 

To  the  general  puhlie,  indeed,  tin-  adoption  of  open 
competition  in  1870  seemed  to  obviate  any  necessity 
for  further  consideration  not  only  of  the  method  by 
which  officials  were  appointed  but  also  of  the  system 
under  which  they  did  their  work.  The  race  of  Tile 
Barnacles,  they  learnt,  was  now  to  become  extinct.  Ap- 
pointment was  to  be  made  by  "merit,"  and  the  announce- 


274        II  I    MAN    N  ATI    IM.    IN    P0LIT1  CS 

menl  of  the  examination  results,  like  the  wedding  in  a 
middle-Victorian  novel,  was  to  be  the  end  of  the  story. 
Hut  in  a  Government  office,  as  certainly  aa  in  a  law-court 
or  a  laboratory,  effective  thinking  will  not  be  done 
unless  adequate  opportunities  and  motives  are  secured 
by  organization  during  the  whole  working  life  of  the 
appointed  officials.  Sinee  1M70,  however,  tin-  organi' 
zation  of  the  Governmenl  Departments  has  either  been 
left  to  the  casual  development  of  office  tradition  in 
each  Department  or  has  been  changed  (as  in  the 
of  the  War  Oilier)  l>\  .m  agitation  directed  againsl  one 
Department  only.  The  official  relations,  for  instance, 
between  the  First  Division  minority  and  the  Second 
Division  majority  of  the  clerks  in  each  office  vary,  not 
on  any  considered  principle,  but  according  to  the 
opinions  and  prejudices  of  some  once-dominant  lmt 
now  forgotten  chief.  The  same  is  true  of  the  relation 
between  the  heads  of  each  section  and  the  officials 
immediately  below  them.  In  at  least  one  office  im- 
portant papers  are  brought  first  to  the  chief.  His 
decision  is  at  once  made,  and  is  sent  down  the  hierarchy 
for  elaboration.  In  other  offices  the  younger  men  are 
given  invaluable  experience,  and  the  elder  men  are  pre- 
vented from  getting  into  an  official  rut,  by  a  system 
which  requires  that  all  papers  should  be  sent  first  to  a 
junior,  who  sends  them  up  to  his  senior  accompanied 
not  only  by  the  necessary  papers  but  also  by  a  minute 
of  his  own  suggesting  official  action.  One  of  these 
two  types  of  organization  must  in  fact  be  better  than 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  275 


the  other,  but  no  one  has  systematically  compared  them. 
In   the  Colonial  Office,  again,   it  is  the  duty   of  the 
Librarian  to  see  that  the  published  books  as  well  as 
the   office    rec  >rda   on   any   question   are   available    for 
everj    official  who  has  to  report  on  it.     In  the  Board 
of  Trade,  which  deals  with  Biibjects  on  which  the  im- 
portance of  published  as  compared  with  official   infor- 
mation is  even  greater,  room  has  only  just  been  found 
for  a  technical  library  which  was  collected  many  years 
The  Foreign  Office  and   the   India  Office  have 
tries,  the  treasury  and  the  Local  Government  Board 
have  nun.-. 

In  the  Exchequer  and  \ndii  Department  a  deliber 
ate  poliq  has  been  adopted  of  training  junior  officials 
b)  transferring  them  at  regular  intervals  to  different 
chea  of  the  work.  The  result*  are  said  to  be 
Uent,  but  nothing  of  the  kind  is  systematically 
done  or  has  even  been  seriously  discussed  in  an)  other 
Department  which  I  know. 

rly  all  departmental  officials  an-  concerned  with 
the  organization  of  non-departmental  work  more  directly 
executive  than  their  own,  and  part  of  a  wise  system 
ol  official  training  would  consist  in  "seconding  voung 
officials  for  experience  in  the  kind  of  work  which  they 
are  to  organize.  The  clerks  of  the  Board  of  V-ri.  ulture 
should  b«-  senl  at  least  once  in  their  career  to  help  in 
superintending  the  killing  of  infected  swine  and  inter- 

1  For  a  long  time  the  Library  of  the  Board  of  Trade  was  kept  at  the. 
Foreign  Office. 


276       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

viewing  actual  farmers,  while  an  official  in  the  Railway 
section  of  the  Board  of  Trade  should  acquire  some 
personal  knowledge  of  the  inside  of  a  railway  office. 
This  principle  of  '"seconding"  might  well  be  extended 
so  as  to  cover  (as  is  already  done  in  the  army)  definite 
periods  of  study  during  which  an  official,  on  leave  of 
absence  with  full  pay,  should  acquire  knowledge  useful 
to  hi>  department;  after  which  he  should  show  the  result 
of  his  work,  not  by  the  answering  of  examination  ques- 
tions, l)ii t  by  the  presentation  of  a  book  or  report  of 
permanent  value. 

The  grim  necessity  of  providing,  after  the  events  of 
the  Boer  War.  for  effective  thought  in  the  government 
of  the  British  army  produced  the  War  Office  Council. 
The  Secretary  of  State,  instead  of  knowing  only  of  those 
suggestions  that  reach  him  through  the  "bottle-neck"  of 
his  senior  official's  mind,  now  sits  once  a  week  at  a 
table  with  half  a  dozen  heads  of  sub-departments.  He 
hears  real  discussion;  he  learns  to  pick  men  for  higher 
work;  and  saves  many  hours  of  circumlocutory  writing. 
At  the  same  time,  owing  to  a  well-known  fact  in  the 
physiology  of  the  human  brain,  the  men  who  are  tired 
of  thinking  on  paper  find  a  new  stimulus  in  the  spoken 
word  and  the  presence  of  their  fellow  human  beings, 
just  as  politicians  who  are  tired  with  talking,  find,  if 
their  minds  are  still  uninjured,  a  new  stimulus  in  the 
silent  use  of  a  pen. 

If  this  periodical  alternation  of  written  and  oral 
discussion  is  useful  in  the  War  Office,  it  would  pro- 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  277 

bably  be  useful  in  other  offices;  but  no  one  with  sufficient 
authority  to  require  an  answer  has  ever  asked  if  it  is  so. 

One  of  the  most  important  functions  of  a  modern 
Government  is  the  effective  publication  of  information, 
but  we  have  no  Department  of  Publicity,  though  we 
have  a  Stationery  Office;  and  it  is,  for  instance,  appar- 
ently a  matter  of  accident  whether  any  particular 
Department  has  or  has  not  a  Gazette  and  how  and 
when  that  Gazette  is  published.  Nor  is  it  any  one  s 
business  to  discover  and  criticize  and  if  necessary  co- 
ordinate the  statistical  methods  of  the  various  official 
publications. 

On  these  points  and  many  others  a  small  Depart- 
mental Committee  (somewhat  on  the  lines  of  that  Eshei 
Committee  which  reorganized  the  War  Office  in  1904), 
consisting  perhaps  of  an  able  manager  of  an  Insurance 
Company,  urith  an  open-minded  Civil  Servant,  and  a 
business  man  with  experience  of  commercial  and  depart- 
mental organization  abroad,  mighl  BUggest  such  im- 
provements as  would  without  increase  of  expense  double 
the  existing  intellectual  output  of  our  Government  offices. 

But  such  a  Committee  will  not  be  appointed  unless 
the  ordinary  members  «»l  parliament,  and  especially  the 
members  who  advocate  a  wide  extension  of  collective 
action,  consider  much  more  seriously  than  they  do  at 
present  the  organization  of  collective  thought.  How, 
for  instance,  are  we  to  prevent  or  minimize  the  danger 
that  a  body  of  officials  will  develop  "official"  habits  of 
thought,  and  a  sense  of  a  corporate   interest  opposed 


278        HUMAN    NATURE    I.N    POLITICS 

to  thai  of  the  majority  of  the  people?  If  a  sufficient  pro- 
portion of  the  ablest  and  best  equipped  young  men  of 
each  generation  are  to  be  induced  to  come  into  the  Gov- 
ernment service  they  must  be  offered  -a lanes  which  place 
them  at  once  among  the  well-to-do  clas-es.  How  are  we 
to  prevent  them  siding  consciously  or  uneonsciousl)  on 
all  questions  of  administration  with  their  economic 
equals?  II  they  do,  the  danger  is  not  only  that  social 
reform  will  be  delayed,  but  also  thai  working  men  in 
England  may  acquire  that  hatred  and  distrust  of  highly 
educated  permanent  officials  which  one  notices  in  any 
gathering  of  working  men  in    America. 

We  are  sometimes  told,  now  that  good  education 
is  open  to  every  one.  that  men  of  every  kind  of  social 
origin  and  class  sympathy  will  enter  to  an  increasing 
extent  the  higher  Civil  Service.  If  that  takes  place  it 
will  be  an  excellent  thing,  but  meanwhile  any  one  who 
follows  die  development  of  the  existing  examination 
system  knows  that  care  is  required  to  guard  against  the 
danger  that  preference  in  marking  may,  if  only  from 
official  tradition,  be  given  to  subjects  like  Greek  and 
Latin  composition,  whose  educational  value  is  not  higher 
than  others,  but  excellence  in  which  is  hardly  ever  ac- 
quired except  by  members  of  one  social  class. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  ruinous  to  sacrifice  intellectual 
efficiency  to  the  dogma  of  promotion  from  the  ranks,  and 
the  statesmen  of  1870  were  perhaps  right  in  thinking 
that  promotion  from  the  second  to  the  first  division  of 
the  service  would  be  in  their  time  so  rare  as  to  be 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  279 


negligible.  But  things  have  changed  since  then.  The 
competition  for  the  second  division  has  become  incom- 
parably more  severe,  and  there  is  no  reasonable  test 
under  which  some  of  those  second  class  officials  who 
have  continued  their  education  by  means  of  reading  and 
University  teaching  in  the  evening  would  not  show,  at 
thirty  years  of  age,  a  greater  fitness  for  the  highest  work 
than  would  be  shown  by  many  of  those  who  had  entered 
by  the  more  advanced  examination. 

But  however  able  our  officials  are,  and  however  varied 
their  origin,  the  danger  of  the  narrowness  and  rigidity 
which   lias  hitherto  so  generally   resulted  from  official 
life  would   -till  remain,  and  must  be  guarded  against 
by   every   kind   of  encouragement   to   free   intellectual 
development.     The  German  Emperor  did  good  service 
the  other  day  when  he  claimed  (in  a  semi-official  com- 
munication ..n  the  Tweedmouth  letter)  that  the  persons 
who  are  Kings  and  Ministers  in  their  official  capacity 
have  as  Fachmanner  (experts)   other  and  wider  rights 
in  the  republic  of  thought.      One  only  wishes  that  he 
would  allow  his  own  officials  after  their  day's  work  to 
regroup  themselves,  in  the  healthy  London  fashion,  with 
labour  leaders,  and  colonels,   and   schoolmasters,   and 
court  ladies,  and  members  of  parliament,  as  individual- 
ists or  socialists,  or  protectors  of  African  aborigines, 
or  theosophists,  or  advocates  of  a  free  stage  or  a  free 
ritual. 

The   intellectual  life  of  the   government   official   is 
indeed  becoming  part  of  a  problem  which  every  year 


280       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

touches  a-  .ill  more  closely.  In  literature  and  Bcience 
as  well  as  in  commerce  and  industry  the  independent 

producer  is  dying  out  and  the  official  is  taking  his  place. 
We  are  nearly  all  of  us  officials  now,  bound  during  our 
working  days,  whether  we  write  on  a  newspaper,  or 
teach  in  a  university,  or  keep  accounts  in  a  bank,  by 
restrictions  on  our  personal  freedom  in  the  interest  of 
a  larger  organization.  We  are  little  influenced  by  that 
direct  and  obi  ions  economic  motive  which  drives  a  small 
shopkeepei  or  farmer  or  country  solicitor  to  a  desperate 
intensity  of  scheming  how  to  outstrip  his  rivals  or  make 
more  profil  oul  of  his  employees,  [f  we  merely  desire 
to  do  as  little  work  and  enjoy  as  much  leisure  as  possible 
in  our  lives,  we  all  find  that  it  pays  us  to  adopt  that 
steady  unanxious  "stroke"  which  neither  advances  nor 
retard-  promotion. 

The  indirect  stimulus,  therefore,  of  interest  and 
variety,  of  public  spirit  and  the  craftsman's  delight  in 
his  skill,  is  becoming  more  important  to  us  as  a  motive 
for  the  higher  forms  of  mental  effort,  and  threats  and 
promises  of  decrease  or  increase  of  salary  less  im- 
portant. And  because  those  higher  efforts  are  needed 
not  only  for  the  advantage  of  the  community  but  for 
the  good  of  our  own  souls  we  are  all  of  us  concerned 
in  teaching  those  distant  impersonal  masters  of  ours 
who  are  ourselves  how  to  prevent  the  opportunity  of 
effective  thought  from  being  confined  to  a  tiny  rich 
minority,  living,  like  the  Cyclopes,  in  irresponsible  free- 
dom.    If  we  consciously  accept  the  fact  that  organized 


OFFICIAL   THOUGHT  281 

work  will  in  the  future  be  the  rule  and  unorganized 
work  the  exception,  and  if  we  deliberately  adjust  our 
methods  of  working  as  well  as  our  personal  ideals  to 
that  condition,  we  need  no  longer  feel  that  the  direction 
of  public  business  must  be  divided  between  an  unin- 
structed  and  unstable  body  of  politicians  and  a  selfish 
and  pedantic  bureaucracy. 


CHAPTER    IV 

NATIONALITY    AND    HUMANITY 

I  HAVE  discussed,  in  the  three  preceding  chapters,  tin- 
probable  effect  of  certain  existing  intellectual  tendencies 
on  our  ideals  of  political  conduct,  our  systems  of  repre- 
sentation, and  the  methods  which  we  adopt  for  securing 
intellectual  initiative  and  efficiency  among  our  profes- 
sional officials — thai  is  to  say,  on  the  internal  organi- 
zation of  the  State. 

In  this  chapter  I  propose  to  discuss  the  effect  of  the 
same  tendencies  on  international  and  interracial  re- 
lations. But,  as  soon  as  one  leaves  the  single  State 
and  deals  with  the  interrelation  of  several  States,  one 
meets  with  the  preliminary  question,  What  is  a  State? 
Is  the  British  Empire,  or  the  Concert  of  Europe,  one 
State  or  many?  Every  community  in  either  area  now 
exerts  political  influence  on  every  other,  and  the  tele- 
graph and  the  steamship  have  abolished  most  of  the 
older  limitations  on  the  further  development  and  exten- 
sion of  that  influence.  Will  the  process  of  coalescence 
go  on  either  in  feeling  or  in  constitutional  form,  or  are 
there  any  permanent  causes  tending  to  limit  the 
geographical  or  racial  sphere  of  effective  political 
solidarity,  and  therefore  the  size  and  composition  of 
States? 

282 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      283 


Aristotle,  writing  under  the  conditions  of  the  ancient 
world,  laid  it  down  that  a  community  whose  population 
extended  to  a  hundred  thousand  would  no  more  be  a 
State  than  would  one  whose  population  was  confined  to 
ten.1  He  based  his  argument  on  measurable  facts  as  to 
the  human  senses  and  the  human  memory.  The  territory 
of  a  State  must  be  "visible  as  a  whole"  by  one  man's  eye, 
and  the  assembly  attended  by  all  the  full  citizens  must 
be  able  to  hear  one  voice — which  must  be  that  oi  an 
actual  man  and  not  of  the  legendary  Stentor.  The 
governing  officials  must  be  able  to  remember  the  faces 
and  characters  of  all  their  fellow  citizens.-  He  did  not 
ignore  the  fact  that  nearly  all  the  world's  surface  as  he 
knew  it  was  occupied  by  States  enormously  larger  than 
his  rule  allowed.  But  he  denied  that  the  great  barbarian 
monarchies  were  in  the  truest  sense  "States"  at  all. 

We  ourselves  are  apt  to  forget  that  the  facts  on 
whirl)  \ri>totle  relied  were  both  real  and  important. 
The  history  of  the  Greek  and  medieval  City-States  shows 
Ik.w  effective  a  -timulus  may  be  given  to  some  of  the 
highest  activities  and  emotions  of  mankind  when  the 
whole  environment  of  each  citizen  comes  within  the  first- 
hand range  of  his  senses  and  memory.  It  is  now  only 
here  and  there,  in  villages  outside  the  main  stream  of 
civilization,  that  men  know  the  faces  of  their  neighbours, 
and  see  daily  as  part  of  one  whole  the  fields  and  cottages 
in  which  they  work  and  rest.     Yet.  even  now,  when  a 

1  Ethics,  ix..  x.  3. 

2  Aristotle,  Polit.,  Bk.  vii.  ch.  iv. 


284       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

village  is  absorbed  by  a  sprawling  suburb  or  over- 
whelmed by  the  influx  of  a  new  industrial  population, 
some  of  the  older  inhabitants  feel  that  they  are  losing 
touch  with  the  deeper  realities  of  life 

A  year  ago  I  stood  with  a  hard-walking  and  hard- 
thinking  old  Yorkshire  schoolmaster  on  the  high  moor- 
land edge  of  Airedale.  Opposite  to  us  was  the  country- 
house  where  Charlotte  Bronte  was  governess,  and  below 
us  ran  the  railway,  linking  a  string  of  manufacturing 
villages  which  already  were  beginning  to  stretch  out 
towards  each  other,  and  threatened  soon  to  extend  through 
the  valley  an  unbroken  succession  of  tall  chimneys  and 
slate  roofs.  He  told  me  how,  within  his  memory,  the 
old  affection  for  place  and  home  had  disappeared  from 
the  district.  I  asked  whether  he  thought  that  a  new 
affection  was  possible,  whether,  now  that  men  lived  in 
the  larger  world  of  knowledge  and  inference,  rather 
than  in  the  narrower  world  of  sight  and  hearing,  a  patriot- 
ism of  books  and  maps  might  not  appear  which  should 
be  a  better  guide  to  life  than  the  patriotism  of  the  village 
street. 

This  he  strongly  denied;  as  the  older  feeling  went, 
nothing,  he  said,  had  taken  its  place,  or  would  take  its 
place,  but  a  naked  and  restless  individualism,  always 
seeking  for  personal  satisfaction,  and  always  missing 
it.  And  then,  almost  in  the  words  of  Morris  and  Ruskin, 
he  began  to  urge  that  we  should  pay  a  cheap  price  if  we 
could  regain  the  true  riches  of  life  by  forgetting  steam 
and  electricity,  and  returning  to  the  agriculture  of  the 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      285 


mediaeval  village  and  the  handicrafts  of  the  mediaeval 
town. 

He  knew  and  I  knew  that  his  plea  was  hopeless.  Even 
under  the  old  conditions  the  Greek  and  Italian  and 
Flemish  City-States  perished,  because  they  were  too 
small  to  protect  themselves  against  larger  though  less 
closely  organized  communities;  and  industrial  progress 
is  an  invader  even  more  irresistible  than  the  armies  of 
Macedon  or  Spain.  For  a  constantly  increasing  pro- 
portion of  the  inhabitants  of  modern  England  there  is 
now  no  place  where  in  the  old  sense  they  "live."  Nearly 
the  whole  of  the  class  engaged  in  the  direction  of  English 
industry,  and  a  rapidly  increasing  proportion  of  the 
manual  workers,  pass  daily  in  tram  or  train  between 
sleeping-place  and  working-place  a  hundred  times  more 
sights  than  their  eyes  can  take  in  or  their  memory  retain. 
They  are,  to  use  Mr.  Wells's  phrase,  "delocalized."1 

But  now  that  we  can  no  longer  take  the  range  of  our 
senses  as  a  basis  for  calculating  the  possible  area  of  the 
civilized  State,  there  might  seem  to  be  no  facts  at  all 
which  can  be  used  for  such  a  calculation.  How  can  we 
fix  the  limits  of  effective  intercommunication  by  steam 
or  electricity,  or  the  area  which  can  be  covered  by  such 
political  expedients  as  representation  and  federalism? 
When  Aristotle  wished  to  illustrate  the  relation  of  the 
size  of  the  State  to  the  powers  of  its  citizens  he  compared 
it  to  a  ship,  which,  he  said,  must  not  be  too  large  to  be 
handled  by  the  muscles  of  actual  men.     "A  ship  of  two 

1  Mankind  in  the  Making,  p.  406. 


286       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

furlongs  length  would  not  be  a  ship  at  all."1  But  the 
Lusitania  is  already  not  very  far  from  a  furlong  and  a 
half  in  length,  and  no  one  can  even  guess  what  is  the 
upward  limit  of  size  which  the  ship-builders  of  a 
generation  hence  will  have  reached.  If  once  we  assume 
that  a  State  may  be  larger  than  the  field  of  vision  of  a 
single  man,  then  the  merely  mechanical  difficulty  of 
bringing  the  whole  earth  under  a  government  as  effective 
as  that  of  the  United  States  or  the  British  Empire  has 
already  been  overcome.  If  such  a  government  is  im- 
possible, its  impossibility  must  be  due  to  the  limits  not 
of  our  senses  and  muscles  but  of  our  powers  of  imagina- 
tion and  sympathy. 

I  have  already  pointed  out2  that  the  modern  State 
must  exist  for  the  thoughts  and  feelings  of  its  citizens, 
not  as  a  fact  of  direct  observation  but  as  an  entity  of 
the  mind,  a  symbol,  a  personification  or  an  abstraction. 
The  possible  area  of  the  State  will  depend,  therefore, 
mainly  on  the  facts  which  limit  our  creation  and  use  of 
such  entities.  Fifty  years  ago  the  statesmen  who  were 
reconstructing  Europe  on  the  basis  of  nationality  thought 
that  they  had  found  the  relevant  facts  in  the  causes  which 
limit  the  physical  and  mental  homogeneity  of  hations.  A 
State,  they  thought,  if  it  is  to  be  effectively  governed, 
must  be  a  homogeneous  "nation,"  because  no  citizen 
can  imagine  his  State  or  make  it  the  object  of  his  political 
affection  unless  he  believes  in  the  existence  of  a  national 

1  Aristotle,  Polit.,  Bk.  vn.  ch.  iv. 

2  Part  i.  ch.  ii.  pp.  72,  73,  and  77-81. 


NATIONALITY   AND   HUMANITY      287 


type  to  which  the  individual  inhabitants  of  the  State  are 
assimilated  ;and  he  cannot  continue  to  believe  in  the 
existence  of  such  a  type  unless  in  fact  his  fellow-citizens 
are  like  each  other  and  like  himself  in  certain  important 
respects.  Bismarck  deliberately  limited  the  area  of  his 
intended  German  Empire  by  a  quantitive  calculation  as 
to  the  possibility  of  assimilating  other  Germans  to  the 
Prussian  type.  He  always  opposed  the  inclusion  of 
Austria,  and  for  a  long  time  the  inclusion  of  Bavaria, 
on  the  ground  that  while  the  Prussian  type  was  strong 
enough  to  assimilate  the  Saxons  and  Hanoverians  to 
itself,  it  would  fail  to  assimilate  Austrians  and  Bavarians. 
He  said,  for  instance,  in  1866:  "We  cannot  use  these 
Ultramontanes,  and  we  must  not  swallow  more  than  we 
can  digest."1 

Mazzini  believed,  with  Bismarck,  that  no  State  could 
be  well  governed  unless  it  consisted  of  a  homogeneous 
nation.  But  Bismarck's  policy  of  the  artificial  assimi- 
lation of  the  weaker  by  the  stronger  type  seemed  to  him 
the  vilest  form  of  tyranny;  and  he  based  his  own  plans 
for  the  reconstruction  of  Europe  upon  the  purpose  of 
God,  as  revealed  by  the  existing  correspondence  of 
national  uniformities  with  geographical  facts.  "God," 
he  said,  "divided  humanity  into  distinct  groups  or  nuclei 
upon  the  face  of  the  earth.  .  .  .  Evil  governments 
have  disfigured  the  Divine  design.  Nevertheless  you 
may  still  trace  it,  distinctly  marked  out — at  least  as  far 
as  Europe  is  concerned — by  the  course  of  the  great  rivers, 

1  Bismarck  (J.  W.  Headlam),  p.  269. 


288       HUMAN   NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


the  direction  of  the  higher  mountains,  and  other  geo- 
graphical conditions."1 

Both  Mazzini  and  Bismarck,  therefore,  opposed  with 
all  their  strength  the  humanitarianism  of  the  French 
Revolution,  the  philosophy  which,  as  Canning  said, 
"reduced  the  nation  into  individuals  in  order  after- 
wards to  congregate  them  into  mobs.""  Mazzini 
attacked  the  "cosmopolitans,"  who  preached  that  all 
men  should  love  each  other  without  distinction  of 
nationality,  on  the  ground  that  they  were  asking  for  a 
psychological  impossibility.  No  man,  he  argued,  can 
imagine,  and  therefore  no  one  can  love,  mankind,  if 
mankind  means  to  him  all  the  millions  of  individual 
human  beings.  Already  in  1836  he  denounced  the 
original  Carbonari  for  this  reason:  "The  cosmopolitan," 
he  then  said,  "alone  in  the  midst  of  the  immense  circle 
by  which  he  is  surrounded,  whose  boundaries  extend 
beyond  the  limits  of  his  vision;  possessed  of  no  other 
weapons  than  the  consciousness  of  his  rights  (often  mis- 
conceived) and  his  individual  faculties — which,  however 
powerful,  are  incapable  of  extending  their  activity 
over  the  whole  sphere  of  application  constituting  the 
aim  .  .  .  has  but  two  paths  before  him.  He  is  com- 
pelled to  choose  between  despotism  and  inertia."  He 
quotes  the  Breton  fisherman  who,  as  he  puts  out  to  sea, 

1  Life  and  Writings  (Smith,  Elder,  1891),  vol.  iv.  (written  1858),  pi 
275. 

2  Canning,  Life  by  Stapleton,  p.  341  (speech  at  Liverpool,  1818). 

3  Mazzini,  Life  and  Writings   (Smith,  Elder,  1891),  vol.  iii.  p.  8. 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      289 


prays  to  God,  "Help  me  my  God!     My  boat  is  so  small 
and  Thy  ocean  so  wide."  1 

For  Mazzini  the  divinely  indicated  nation  stood  there- 
fore between  the  individual  man  and  the  unimaginable 
multitude  of  the  human  race.  A  man  could  comprehend 
and  love  his  nation  because  it  consisted  of  beings  like 
himself  "speaking  the  same  language,  gifted  with  the 
same  tendencies  and  educated  by  the  same  historical 
tradition,"  2  and  could  be  thought  of  as  a  single  national 
entity.  The  nation  was  "the  intermediate  term  between 
humanity  and  the  individual,"  !  and  man  could  only 
attain  to  the  conception  of  humanity  by  picturing  it  to 
himself  as  a  mosaic  of  homogeneous  nations.  "Nations 
are  the  citizens  of  humanity  as  individuals  are  the  citizens 
of  the  nation,"  4  and  again,  "The  pact  of  humanity  can- 
not be  signed  by  individuals,  but  only  by  free  and  equal 
peoples,  possessing  a  name,  a  banner,  and  the  conscious- 
ness of  a  distinct  existence." 

Nationalism,  as  interpreted  either  by  Bismarck  or  by 
Mazzini,  played  a  great  and  valuable  part  in  the  de- 
velopment of  the  political  consciousness  of  Europe 
during  the  nineteenth  century.  But  it  is  becoming  less 
and  less  possible  to  accept  it  as  a  solution  for  the 
problems   of  the   twentieth   century.     We   cannot  now 

1  Mazzini,   Life  and    Writings    ( Smith,   Elder,   1891),   vol.   iv.   p.   274. 

2  Ibid  vol.  iv.  p.  276   (written  1858). 
■  Ibid,  vol.  v.  p.  273. 

4  Ibid.,  vol.  v.  p.  274  (written  1849). 

5  Ibid.,  vol.  iii.  p.  15   (written  1836). 


290       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

assert  with  Mazzini  that  the  "indisputable  tendency  of 
our  epoch  is  towards  a  reconstitution  of  Europe  into  a 
certain  number  of  homogeneous  national  States  "as 
nearly  as  possible  equal  in  population  and  extent."  * 
Mazzini,  indeed,  unconsciously  but  enormously  exagger- 
ated the  simplicity  of  the  question  even  in  his  own  time. 
National  types  throughout  the  greater  part  of  South-east- 
ern Europe  were  not  even  then  divided  into  homoge- 
neous units  by  "the  course  of  the  great  rivers  and  the  di- 
rection of  the  high  mountains,"  but  were  intermingled 
from  village  to  village;  and  events  have  since  forced  us 
to  admit  that  fact.  We  no  longer,  for  instance,  can  be- 
lieve, as  Mr.  Swinburne  and  the  other  English  disciples 
of  Mazzini  and  of  Kossuth  seem  to  have  believed  in  the 
eighteen  sixties,  that  Hungary  is  inhabited  only  by  a 
homogeneous  population  of  patriotic  Magyars.  We  can 
see  that  Mazzini  was  already  straining  his  principle  to 
the  breaking  point  when  he  said  in  1852:  "It  is  in  the 
power  of  Greece  ...  to  become,  by  extending  itself  to 
Constantinople,  a  powerful  barrier  against  the  European 
encroachments  of  Russia."  In  Macedonia  to-day  bands 
of  Bulgarian  and  Greek  patriots,  both  educated  in  the 
pure  tradition  of  Mazzinism,  are  attempting  to  extermi- 
nate the  rival  populations  in  order  to  establish  their 
own  claim  to  represent  the  purposes  of  God  as  indicated 
by  the  position  of  the  Balkan  mountains.     Mazzini  him- 

1  Mazzini,  Life  and   Writings   (Smith,  Elder,  1891),  vol.  v.  p.  275. 

2  Ibid.,  vol.  vi.  p.  258. 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      291 


self  would,  perhaps,  were  he  living  now,  admit  that,  if 
the  Bismarckian  policy  of  artificial  assimilation  is  to  be 
rejected,  there  must  continue  to  be  some  States  in  Europe 
which  contain  inhabitants  belonging  to  widely  different 
national  types. 

Bismarck's  conception  of  an  artificial  uniformity 
created  by  "blood  and  iron"  corresponded  more  closely 
than  did  Mazzini's  to  the  facts  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
But  its  practicability  depended  upon  the  assumption 
that  the  members  of  the  dominant  nationality  would 
always  vehemently  desire  to  impose  their  own  type  on 
the  rest.  Now  that  the  Social-Democrats,  who  are  a  not 
inconsiderable  proportion  of  the  Prussian  population, 
apparently  admire  their  Polish  or  Bavarian  or  Danish 
fellow-subjects  all  the  more  because  they  cling  to  their 
own  national  characteristics,  Prince  Biilow's  Bismarck- 
ian dictum  the  other  day,  that  the  strength  of  Germany 
depends  on  the  existence  and  dominance  of  an  intensely 
national  Prussia,  seemed  a  mere  political  survival.  The 
same  change  of  feeling  has  also  shown  itself  in  the 
United  Kingdom,  and  both  the  English  parties  have  now 
tacitly  or  explicitly  abandoned  the  Anglicization  of 
Ireland  and  Wales,  which  all  parties  once  accepted  as  a 
necessary  part  of  English  policy. 

A  still  more  important  difficulty  in  applying  the  prin- 
ciple that  the  area  of  the  State  should  be  based  on 
homogeneity  of  national  type,  whether  natural  or 
artificial,  has  been  created  by  the  rapid  extension  during 
the  last  twenty-five  years  of  all  the  larger  European 


292       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

States    into  non-European  territory.      Neither   Mazzini, 
till  his  death  in   L872,  nor  Bismarck,  till  the  colonial 

adventure  of  1884,  was  compelled  to  take  into  his  cal- 
culations the  inclusion  of  territories  and  peoples  outside 
Europe.  Neither  of  them,  therefore,  made  any  effective 
intellectual  preparation  for  those  problems  which  have 
heen  raised  in  our  time  hy  "the  scramble  for  the  world." 
Mazzini  seems,  indeed,  to  have  vaguely  expected  that 
nationality  would  spread  from  Europe  into  Asia  and 
Africa,  and  that  the  "pact  of  humanity"  would  ultimately 
be  "signed"  by  homogeneous  and  independent  "nations," 
who  would  cover  the  whole  land  surface  of  the  globe. 
But  he  never  indicated  the  political  forces  by  which  thai 
result  was  to  be  brought  about.  The  Italian  invasion  of 
Abyssinia  in  1896  might  have  been  represented  either 
as  a  necessary  stage  in  the  Mazzinian  policy  of  spread- 
ing the  idea  of  nationality  to  Africa,  or  as  a  direct  con- 
tradiction of  that  idea  itself. 

Bismarck,  with  his  narrower  and  more  practical  in- 
tellect, never  looked  forward,  as  Mazzini  did,  to  a  "pact 
of  humanity,"  which  should  include  even  the  nations  of 
Europe,  and,  indeed,  always  protested  against  the  at- 
tempt to  conceive  of  any  relation  whatosover,  moral  or 
political,  as  existing  between  any  State  and  the  States  or 
populations  outside  its  boundaries.  "The  only  sound 
principle  of  action,"  he  said,  "for  a  great  State  is 
political  egoism."  x  When,  therefore,  after  Bismarck's 
death   German   sailors   and   soldiers   found   themselves 

1  Speech,  1850,  quoted  by  J.  W.  Headlam,  Bismarck,  p.  83. 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      293 

— ^— ^— — —— — ^— ^— ^ 

in  contact  with  the  defenseless  inhabitants  of  China  or 
East  Africa,  they  were,  as  the  Social  Democrats  quickly 
pointed  out,  provided  with  no  conception  of  the  situa- 
tion more  highly  developed  than  that  which  was  acted 
upon  in  the  fifth  century  A.D.,  by  Attila  and  his  Huns. 
The  modern  English  imperialists  tried  for  some  time 
to  apply  the  idea  of  national  homogeneity  to  the  facts  of 
the  British  Empire.  From  the  publication  of  Seeley's 
"Expansion  of  England"  in  1883  till  the  Peace  of  Verec- 
niging  in  1902  they  strove  to  believe  in  the  existence  of 
a  "Blood,"  an  "Island  Race,"  consisting  of  homogene- 
ous English-speaking  individuals,  among  whom  were  to 
be  reckoned  not  only  the  whole  population  of  the  United 
Kingdom,  but  all  the  reasonably  white  inhabitants  of  our 
colonies  and  dependencies;  while  they  thought  of  the 
other  inhabitants  of  the  Empire  as  "the  white  man's  bur- 
den"— the  necessary  material  for  the  exercise  of  the 
white  man's  virtues.  The  idealists  among  them,  when 
the)  wire  forced  to  realize  that  such  a  homogeneity  of 
the  whites  did  not  yet  exi>t,  persuaded  themselves  that 
it  would  come  peacefully  and  inevitably  as  a  result  of 
the  reading  of  imperial  poems  and  the  summoning  of 
an  imperial  council.  The  Bismarckian  realists  among 
them  believed  that  it  would  be  brought  about,  in  South 
\irica  and  elsewhere,  by  "blood  and  iron."  Lord  Mil- 
ner,  who  is  perhaps  the  most  loyal  adherent  of  the  Bis- 
marckian tradition  to  be  found  out  of  Germany,  con- 
tended even  at  Vereeniging  against  peace  with  the  Boers 
on  any  terms  except  such  an  unconditional  surrender  as 


294       HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 


would  involve  the  ultimate  Anglicization  of  the  South 
African  colonies.  He  still  dreams  of  a  British  Empire 
whose  egoism  shall  be  as  complete  as  that  of  Bismarck's 
Prussia,  and  warns  us  in  1907,  in  the  style  of  1887, 
against  those  "ideas  of  our  youth"  which  were  "at  once 
too  insular  and  too  cosmopolitan."1 

But  in  the  minds  of  most  of  our  present  imperialists, 
imperial  egoism  is  now  deprived  of  its  only  possible 
psychological  basis.  It  is  to  be  based  not  upon  national 
homogeneity  but  upon  the  consciousness  of  national  va- 
riation. The  French  in  Canada  are  to  remain  intensely 
French,  and  the  Dutch  in  South  Africa  intensely  Dutch; 
though  both  are  to  be  divided  from  the  world  outside 
the  British  Empire  by  an  unbridgeable  moral  chasm. 
To  imperialism  so  conceived  facts  lend  no  support.  The 
loyal  acceptance  of  British  Imperial  citizenship  by  Sir 
Wilfred  Laurier  or  General  Botha  constitute  something 
more  subtle,  something,  to  adapt  Lord  Milner's  phrase, 
less  insular  but  more  cosmopolitan  than  imperial  egoism. 
It  does  not,  for  instance,  involve  an  absolute  indifference 
to  the  question  whether  France  or  Holland  shall  be  swal- 
lowed up  by  the  sea. 

At  the  same  time  the  non-white  races  within  the 
Empire  show  no  signs  of  enthusiastic  contentment  at 
the  prospect  of  existing,  like  the  English  "poor"  during 
the  eighteenth  century,  as  the  mere  material  of  other 
men's  virtues.  They  too  have  their  own  vague  ideas  of 
nationality;  and  if  those  ideas  do  not  ultimately  break 

i  Times,  Dec.  19,  1907. 


NATIONALITY   AND   HUMANITY      295 


up  our  Empire,  it  will  be  because  they  are  enlarged  and 
held  in  check,  not  by  the  sentiment  of  imperial  egoism, 
but  by  those  wider  religious  and  ethical  conceptions 
which  pay  little  heed  to  imperial  or  national  frontiers. 
It  may,  however,  be  objected  by  our  imperial  "Real- 
politiker"  that  cosmopolitan  feeling  is  at  this  moment 
both  visionary  and  dangerous,  not  because,  as  Mazzini 
thought,  it  is  psychologically  impossible,  but  because  of 
the  plain  facts  of  our  military  position.  Our  Empire, 
they  say,  will  have  to  fight  for  its  existence  against  a 
German  or  a  Russian  Empire  or  both  together  during 
the  next  generation,  and  our  only  chance  of  success  is  to 
create  that  kind  of  imperial  sentiment  which  has  fight- 
ing value.  If  the  white  inhabitants  of  the  Empire  are 
encouraged  to  think  of  themselves  as  a  "dominant  race," 
that  is  to  say  as  both  a  homogeneous  nation  and  a  nat- 
ural aristocracy,  they  will  soon  be  hammered  by  actual 
fighting  into  a  Bismarckian  temper  of  imperial  "ego- 
ism." Among  the  non-white  inhabitants  of  the  Empire 
(since  either  side  in  the  next  inter-imperial  war  will, 
after  its  first  defeat,  abandon  the  convention  of 
only  employing  European  troops  against  Europeans) 
we  must  discover  and  drill  those  races  who  like  the  Gurk- 
has and  Soudanese,  may  be  expected  to  fight  for  us  and 
to  hate  our  enemies  without  asking  for  political  rights. 
In  any  case  we,  like  Bismarck,  must  extirpate,  as  the 
most  fatal  solvent  of  empire,  that  humanitarianism 
which  concerns  itself  with  the  interests  of  our  future 
opponents  as  well  as  those  of  our  fellow-subjects. 


Ill    MAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

i 

This  soil  of  argument  might  of  course  be  me!  I>\  a 
reductio  ad  abswdum.     If  the  policy  of  imperial  egoism 

is  a  successful  one  it  will  be  adopted  by  all  empires  alike, 

and  whether  we  desire  it  or  not,  the  victor  in  each  inter- 
imperial  war  will  take  over  the  territory  of  the  loser. 
After  centuries  of  warfare  and  the  steady  retrogression, 
in  the  waste  of  blood  and  treasure  and  loyalty,  of  modern 
civilization,  two  empires,  England  and  Germany,  or 
America  and  China,  may  remain.  Both  will  possess  an 
armament  which  represents  the  whole  "surplus  value," 
beyond  mere  subsistence,  created  b)  its  inhabitant-. 
Both  will  contain  white  and  yellow  and  brown  and  black 
men  hating  each  other  across  a  wavering  line  on  the  map 
of  the  world.  But  the  struggle  will  go  on,  and,  as  the 
result  of  a  naval  Armageddon  in  the  Pacific,  only  one 
Empire  will  exist.  "Imperial  egoism,"  having  worked 
itself  out  to  its  logical  conclusion,  will  have  no  further 
meaning,  and  the  inhabitants  of  the  globe,  diminished 
to  half  their  number,  will  be  compelled  to  consider  the 
problems  of  race  and  of  the  organized  exploitation  of  the 
globe  from  the  point  of  view  of  mere  humanitarianism. 
Is  the  suggestion  completely  wanting  in  practicability 
that  we  might  begin  that  consideration  before  the  struggle 
goes  any  further?  Fifteen  hundred  years  ago,  in  south- 
eastern Europe,  men  who  held  the  Homoousian  opinion 
of  the  Trinity  were  gathered  in  arms  against  the 
Homoiousians.  The  generals  and  other  "Real-politiker" 
on  both  sides  may  have  feared,  like  Lord  Milner,  lest 
their  followers  should  become  "too  cosmopolitan,"  too 


NATIONALITY    AND    HUMANITY      297 

* 

ready  to  extend  their  sympathies  across  the  frontiers  of 
theology.  "This,"  a  Homoousian  may  have  said  ,  "is  a 
practical  matter.  Unless  our  side  learn  by  training 
themselves  in  theological  egoism  to  hate  the  other  side, 
we  shall  be  beaten  in  the  next  battle."  And  yet  we  can 
now  see  that  the  practical  interests  of  Europe  were  very 
little  concerned  with  the  question  whether  "we"  or  "they" 
won,  but  very  seriously  concerned  with  the  question 
whether  the  division  itself  into  "we"  or  "they"  could 
not  I)*-  obliterated  by  the  discovery  either  of  a  less  clumsy 
metaphysic,  or  of  a  way  of  thinking  about  humanity 
which  made  the  continued  existence  of  those  who  dis- 
agreed  with  one  in  theology  no  longer  intolerable.  May 
the  Germans  and  ourselves  be  now  marching  towards 
the  horrors  of  a  world-war  merely  because  "nation" 
and  "empire"  like  "Homoousia"  and  "Homoiousia"  are 
the  best  thai  we  can  <lo  in  making  entities  of  the  mind 
to  stand  between  us  and  an  unintelligible  universe,  and 
because  having  made  such  entities  our  sympathies  are 
shut  up  within  them? 

I  have  already  urged,  when  considering  the  conditions 
of  political  reasoning,  that  many  of  the  logical  difficul- 
ties arising  from  our  tendency  to  divide  the  infinite 
stream  of  our  thoughts  and  sensations  into  homogeneous 
classes  and  species  are  now  unnecessary  and  have  been 
avoided  in  our  time  by  the  students  of  the  natural 
sciences.  Just  as  the  modern  artist  substitutes  without 
mental  confusion  his  ever-varying  curves  and  surfaces 
for  the  straight  and  simple  lines  of  the  savage,  so  the 


298       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


scientific  imagination  lias  learnt  to  deal  with  the  varying 
facts  of  nature  without  thinking  of  them  as  separate 
groups,  each  composed  of  identical  individuals  and  rep- 
resented to  us  by  a  single  type. 

Can  we  learn  so  to  think  of  the  varying  individuals 
of  the  whole  human  race?  Can  we  do,  that  is  to  say, 
what  Mazzini  declared  to  be  impossible?  And  if  we 
can,  shall  we  be  able  to  love  the  fifteen  hundred  million 
different  human  beings  of  whom  we  are  thus  enabled 
to  think? 

To  the  first  question  the  publication  of  the  "Origin  of 
Species"  in  1859  offered  an  answer.  Since  then  we 
have  in  fact  been  able  to  represent  the  human  race  to  our 
imagination,  neither  as  a  chaos  of  arbitrarily  varying 
individuals,  nor  as  a  mosaic  of  homogeneous  nations, 
but  as  a  biological  group,  every  individual  in  which 
differs  from  every  other  not  arbitrarily  but  according 
to  an  intelligible  process  of  organic  evolution.1  And, 
since  that  which  exists  for  the  imagination  can  exist 
also  for  the  emotions,  it  might  have  been  hoped  that 
the  second  question  would  also  have  been  answered 
by  evolution,  and  that  the  warring  egoisms  of  nations 
and  empires  might  henceforth  have  been  dissolved  by 

1  Sir  Sydney  Olivier,  e.  g.  in  his  courageous  and  penetrating  book 
White  Capital  and  Coloured  Labour  considers  (in  chap,  ii.)  the  racial 
distinctions  between  black  and  white  from  the  point  of  view  of  evolu- 
tion. This  consideration  brings  him  at  once  to  "  the  infinite,  inexhaus- 
tible distinctness  of  personality  between  individuals,  so  much  a  fundamen- 
tal fact  of  life  that  one  almost  would  say  that  the  amalgamating  race- 
characteristics  are  merely  incrustations  concealing  his  sparkling  vari- 
ety" (pp.  12,  13). 


NATIONALITY   AND   HUMANITY      299 


love  for  that  infinitely  varying  multitude  whom  we 
can  watch  as  they  work  their  way  through  so  much 
pain  and  confusion  towards  a  more  harmonious  relation 
to  the  universe. 

But  it  was  the  intellectual  tragedy  of  the  nineteenth 
century  that  the  discovery  of  organic  evolution,  instead 
of  stimulating  such  a  general  love  of  humanity,  seemed 
at  first  to  show  that  it  was  for  ever  impossible.  Pro- 
gress, it  appeared,  had  been  always  due  to  a  ruthless 
struggle  for  life,  which  must  still  continue  unless 
progress  was  to  cease.  Pity  and  love  would  turn  the 
edge  of  the  struggle,  and  therefore  would  lead  inevit- 
ably to  the  degeneration  of  the  species. 

This  grim  conception  of  an  internecine  conflict, 
inevitable  and  unending,  in  which  all  races  must  play 
their  part,  hung  for  a  generation  after  1859  over  the 
study  of  world-politics  as  the  fear  of  a  cooling  sun  hung 
over  physics,  and  the  fear  of  a  population  to  be  checked 
only  by  famine  and  war  hung  over  the  first  century  of 
political  economy.  Before  Darwin  wrote,  it  had  been 
possible  for  philanthropists  to  think  of  the  non-white 
laces  as  "men  and  brothers"  who,  after  a  short  process 
of  education,  would  become  in  all  respects  except  colour 
identical  with  themselves.  Darwin  made  it  clear  that 
the  difficulty  could  not  be  so  glossed  over.  Racial 
variations  were  shown  to  be  unaffected  by  education, 
to  have  existed  for  millions  of  years,  and  to  be  tending 
perhaps  towards  divergence  rather  than  assimilation. 

The  practical  problem  also  of  race  relationship  has, 


300       HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 

by  a  coincidence,  presented  itself  since  Darwin  wrote 
in  a  sterner  form.  During  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  the  European  colonists  who  were  in 
daily  contact  with  non-European  races,  although  their 
impulses  and  their  knowledge  alike  revolted  from  the 
optimistic  ethnology  of  Exeter  Hall,  yet  could  escape 
all  thought  about  their  own  position  by  assuming  th.it 
the  problem  would  settle  itself.  To  the  natives  of 
Australia  or  Canada  or  the  Hottentots  of  South  Africa 
trade  automatically  brought  disease,  and  disease  cleared 
the  land  for  a  stronger  population.  But  the  weakest 
races  and  individuals  have  now  died  out,  the  surviving 
populations  are  showing  unexpected  powers  of  resisting 
the  white  man's  epidemics,  and  we  are  adding  every 
year  to  our  knowledge  of,  and  therefore  our  respon- 
sibility for,  the  causation  of  infection.  We  are  nearing 
the  time  when  the  extermination  of  races,  if  it  is  done 
at  all,  must  be  done  deliberately. 

If  the  extermination  is  to  be  both  inevitable  and 
deliberate  how  can  there  exist  a  community  either  of 
affection  or  purpose  between  the  killers  and  the  killed? 
No  one  at  this  moment  professes,  as  far  as  I  know,  to 
have  an  easy  and  perfect  answer  to  this  question.  The 
point  of  ethics  lies  within  the  region  claimed  by  re- 
ligion. But  Christianity,  which  at  present  is  the 
religion  chiefly  concerned,  has  conspicuously  failed 
even  to  produce  a  tolerable  working  compromise.  The 
official  Christian  theory  is,  apparently,  that  all  human 
souls  are  of  equal  value,  and  that  it  ought  to  be  a 


NATIONALITY   AND    HUMANITY      301 

matter  of  indifference  to  us  whether  a  given  territory 
is  inhabited  a  thousand  years  hence  by  a  million  con- 
verted Central  African  pigmies  or  a  million  equally 
converted  Europeans  or  Hindus.  On  the  practical 
point,  however,  whether  the  stronger  race  should  base 
its  plans  of  extension  on  the  extermination  of  the 
weaker  race,  or  on  an  attempt,  within  the  limits  of  racial 
possibility,  to  improve  it,  Christians  have,  during  the 
nineteenth  century,  been  infinitely  more  ruthless  than 
Mohammedans,  though  their  ruthlessness  has  often  been 
disguised  by  more  or  less  conscious  hypocrisy. 

But  the  most  immediately  dangerous  result  of 
political  "Darwinism"  was  not  its  effect  in  justifying 
the  extermination  of  African  aborigines  by  European 
colonists,  but  the  fact  that  the  conception  of  the 
"struggle  for  life"  could  be  used  as  a  proof  that  that 
conflict  among  the  European  nations  for  the  control 
of  the  trade-routes  of  the  world  which  has  been  threaten- 
ing for  the  last  quarter  of  a  century  is  for  each  of  the 
nations  concerned  both  a  scientific  necessity  and  a  moral 
duty.  Lord  Ampthill,  for  instance,  the  athletic  ex- 
governor  of  Madras,  said  the  other  day:  "From  an 
individual  struggle,  a  struggle  of  families,  of  com- 
munities, and  nations,  the  struggle  for  existence  has  now 
advanced  to  a  struggle  of  empires."1 

The  exhilaration  with  which  Lord  Ampthill  pro- 
claims that  one-half  of  the  species  must  needs  slaughter 
the    other    half    in  the    cause    of    human    progress    is 

1  Times,  Jan.  22,  1908- 


302       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 


particularly  terrifying  when  one  reflects  that  he  may 
have  to  conduct  negotiations  as  a  member  of  the  next 
Conservative  Government  with  a  German  statesman 
like  Prince  Biilow,  who  seems  to  combine  the  teaching 
of  Bismarck  with  what  he  understands  to  have  been 
the  teaching  of  Darwin  when  he  defends  the  Polish 
policy  of  his  master  by  a  declaration  that  the  rules 
of  private  morality  do  not  apply  to  national  conduct. 

Any  such  identification  of  the  biological  advantage 
arising  from  the  "struggle  for  life"  among  individuals 
with  that  which  is  to  be  expected  from  a  "struggle  of 
empires"  is,  of  course,  thoroughly  unscientific.  The 
"struggle  of  empires,"  must  either  be  fought  out  between 
European  troops  alone,  or  between  Europeans  in  com- 
bination with  their  non-European  allies  and  subjects. 
If  it  takes  the  first  form,  and  if  we  assume,  as  Lord 
Ampthill  probably  does,  that  the  North  European  racial 
type  is  "higher"  than  any  other,  then  the  slaughter  of 
half  a  million  selected  Englishmen  and  half  a  million 
selected  Germans  will  clearly  be  an  act  of  biological 
retrogression.  Even  if  the  non-European  races  are 
brought  in,  and  a  corresponding  number  of  selected 
Turks  and  Arabs  and  Tartars,  or  of  Gurkhas  and  Pathans 
and  Soudanese  are  slaughtered,  the  biological  loss  to 
the  world,  as  measured  by  the  percentage  of  surviving 
"higher"  or  "lower"  individuals  will  only  be  slightly 
diminished. 

Nor    is    that   form    of   the    argument   much    better 
founded  which  contends  that  the  evolutionary  advan- 


NATIONALITY   AND   HUMANITY      303 


tage  to  be  expected  from  the  "struggle  of  empires"  is 
the  "survival"  not  of  races  but  of  political  and  cultural 
types.  Our  victory  over  the  German  Empire,  for  in- 
stance, would  mean,  it  is  said,  a  victory  for  the  idea  of 
political  liberty.  This  argument,  which,  when  urged 
by  the  rulers  of  India,  sounds  somewhat  temerarious, 
requires  the  assumption  that  types  of  culture  are  in  the 
modern  world  most  successfully  spread  by  military 
occupation.  But  in  the  ancient  world  Greek  culture 
spread  most  rapidly  after  the  fall  of  the  Greek  Empire; 
Japan  in  our  own  time  adopted  Western  culture  more 
readily  as  an  independent  nation  than  she  would  have 
done  as  a  dependency  of  Russia  or  France;  and  India 
is  perhaps  more  likely  today  to  learn  from  Japan  than 
from  England. 

Lord  Ampthill's  phrase,  however,  represents  not  so 
much  an  argument,  as  a  habit  of  feeling  shared  by 
many  who  have  forgotten  or  never  known  the  biological 
doctrine  which  it  echoes.  The  first  followers  of  Darwin 
believed  that  the  human  species  had  been  raised  above 
its  prehuman  ancestors  because,  and  in  so  far  as,  it  had 
surrendered  itself  to  a  blind  instinct  of  conflict.  It 
seemed,  therefore,  as  if  the  old  moral  precept  that  men 
should  control  their  more  violent  impulses  by  reflection 
had  been  founded  upon  a  mistake.  Unreflecting  in- 
stinct was,  after  all,  the  best  guide,  and  nations  who 
acted  instinctively  towards  their  neighbours  might 
justify  themselves,  like  the  Parisian  ruffians  of  ten 
years  ago,  by  claiming  to  be  "strugforlifeurs." 


304       HUMAN    NATURE    IN    POLITICS 

If  this  habit  of  mind  is  to  be  destroyed  it  must  be 
opposed,  not  merely  by  a  new  argument,  bill  b\  a  con- 
ception of  man's  relation  to  the  universe  which  creates 

emotional  force  as  well  as  intellectual  conviction. 

And  the  change  that  has  already  shown  itsrlt  in  our 
conception  of  the  struggle  for  life  among  individuals 
indicates  that,  by  some  divine  chance,  a  corresponding 
change  may  come  in  our  conception  of  the  struggle 
between  peoples.  The  evolutionists  of  our  own  time 
tell  us  that  the  improvement  of  the  biological  inheritance 
of  any  community  is  to  be  hoped  for,  not  from  the 
encouragement  of  individual  conflict,  but  from  the 
stimulation  of  the  higher  social  impulses  under  the 
guidance  of  the  science  of  eugenics;  and  the  emotional 
effect  of  this  new  conception  is  already  seen  in  the 
almost  complete  disappearance  from  industrial  politics 
of  that  unwillingly  brutal  "individualism"  which  af- 
flicted kindly  Englishmen  in  the  eighteen  sixties. 

An  international  science  of  eugenics  might  in  the 
same  way  indicate  that  the  various  races  should  aim, 
not  at  exterminating  each  other,  but  at  encouraging 
the  improvement  by  each  of  its  own  racial  type.  Such 
an  idea  would  not  appeal  to  those  for  whom  the  whole 
species  arranges  itself  in  definite  and  obvious  grades 
of  "higher"  and  "lower,"  from  the  northern  Europeans 
downwards,  and  who  are  as  certain  of  the  ultimate 
necessity  of  a  "white  world,"  as  the  Sydney  politicians 
are  of  the  necessity  of  a  "white  Australia."  But  in 
this  respect  during  the  last  few  years  the  inhabitants 


NATIONALITY  AND  HUMANITY       305 

of  Europe  have  shown  signs  of  a  new  humility,  due 
partly  to  widespread  intellectual  causes  and  partly  to 
the  hard  facts  of  the  Russo-Japanese  war  and  the  arming 
of  China.  The  "'spheres  of  influence,"  into  which  we 
divided  the  Far  East  eight  years  ago,  seem  to  us  now 
a  rather  stupid  joke,  and  those  who  read  history  are 
already  bitterly  ashamed  that  we  destroyed,  by  the  sack 
of  the  Summer  Palace  in  1859,  the  products  of  a  thou- 
sand years  of  such  art  as  we  can  never  hope  to  emulate. 
We  are  coming  honestly  to  believe  that  the  world  is 
richer  for  the  existence  both  of  other  civilizations  and 
of  other  racial  types  than  our  own.  We  have  been 
compelled  by  the  study  of  the  Christian  documents  to 
think  of  our  religion  as  one  only  among  the  religions 
<>l  the  world,  and  to  acknowledge  that  it  has  owed 
much  and  may  owe  much  again  to  the  longer  philoso- 
phic tradition  and  tin-  Bubtler  and  more  patient  brains 
of  Hindustan  and  Persia.  Even  if  we  look  at  the 
future  of  the  species  as  a  matter  of  pure  biology,  we 
are  warned  by  men  of  science  that  it  is  not  safe  to  de- 
pend only  on  one  family  or  one  variety  for  the  whole 
breeding-stock  of  the  world.  For  the  moment  we 
shrink  from  the  interbreeding  of  races,  but  we  do  so 
in  spite  of  some  conspicuous  examples  of  successful 
interbreeding  in  the  past,  and  largely  because  of  our 
complete  ignorance  of  the  conditions  on  which  success 
depends. 

Already,  therefore,  it  is  possible  without  intellectual 
dishonesty  to  look  forward   to   a  future   for  the  race 


306       HUMAN   NATURE   IN   POLITICS 

^__^__ —  » 

which  need  not  be  reached  through  a  welter  of  blood 
and  hatred.  We  can  imagine  the  nations  settling  the 
racial  allocation  of  the  temperate  or  tropical  breeding- 
grounds,  or  even  deliberately  placing  the  males  and 
females  of  the  few  hopelessly  backward  tribes  on 
different  islands,  without  the  necessity  that  the  most 
violent  passions  of  mankind  should  be  stimulated  in 
preparation  for  a  general  war.  No  one  now  expects 
an  immediate,  or  prophesies  with  certainty  an  ultimate, 
Federation  of  the  Globe;  but  the  consciousness  of  a 
common  purpose  in  mankind,  or  even  the  acknowledg- 
ment that  such  a  common  purpose  is  possible,  would 
alter  the  face  of  world-politics  at  once.  The  discussion 
at  The  Hague  of  a  halt  in  the  race  of  armaments  would 
no  longer  seem  Utopian,  and  the  strenuous  profession 
by  the  colonizing  powers  that  they  have  no  selfish  ends 
in  view  might  be  transformed  from  a  sordid  and  use- 
less hypocrisy  into  a  fact  to  which  each  nation  might 
adjust  its  policy.  The  irrational  race-hatred  which 
breaks  out  from  time  to  time  on  the  fringes  of  empire 
would  have  little  effect  in  world  politics  when  opposed 
by  a  consistent  conception  of  the  future  of  human 
progress. 

Meanwhile,  it  is  true,  the  military  preparations  for 
a  death-struggle  of  empires  still  go  on,  and  the  problem 
even  of  peaceful  immigration  becomes  yearly  more 
threatening,  now  that  shipping  companies  can  land  tens 
of  thousands  of  Chinese  or  Indian  labourers  for  a 
pound  or  two  a  head  at  any  port  in  the  world.     But 


NATIONALITY  AND  HUMANITY       307 

* 

when  we  think  of  such  tilings  we  need  no  longer  feel 
ourselves  in  the  grip  of  a  Fate  that  laughs  at  human 
purpose  and  human  kindliness.  *  An  idea  of  the  whole 
existence  of  our  species  is  at  last  a  possible  background 
to  our  individual  experience.  Its  emotional  effect  may 
prove  to  be  not  less  than  that  of  the  visible  temples 
and  walls  of  the  Greek  cities,  although  it  is  formed 
not  from  the  testimony  of  our  eyesight,  but  from  the 
knowledge  which  we  acquire  in  our  childhood  and 
confirm  by  the  half-conscious  corroboration  of  our 
daily  life. 

We  all  of  us,  plain  folk  and  learned  alike,  now  make 
a  picture  for  ourselves  of  the  globe  with  its  hemi- 
spheres of  light  and  shadow,  from  ever)'  point  of  which 
the  telegraph  brings  us  hourly  news,  and  which  may 
already  be  more  real  to  us  than  the  fields  and  houses 
past  which  we  hurry  in  the  train.  We  can  all  see  it, 
hanging  and  turning  in  the  monstrous  emptiness  of 
the  skies,  and  obedient  to  forces  whose  action  we  can 
watch  hundreds  of  light-years  away  and  feel  in  the 
beating  of  our  hearts.  The  sharp  new  evidence  of  the 
camera  brings  every  year  nearer  to  us  its  surface  of 
ice  and  rock  and  plain,  and  the  wondering  eyes  of 
alien  peoples. 

It  may  be  that  we  shall  long  continue  to  differ  as 
to  the  full  significance  of  this  vision.  But  now  that 
we  can  look  at  it  without  helpless  pain  it  may  stir 
the  deepest  impulses  of  our  being.  To  some  of  us  it 
may  bring  confidence  in  that  Love  that  Dante  saw,  "which 


308 


HUMAN   NATURE   IN    POLITICS 


moves  the  Sun  and  the  other  Stars."  To  each  of  01 
it  may  BUggesI  a  kinder  pity  for  all  tin-  l.rwil.lered 
beings  who  hand  on  from  generation  to  generation  the 
torch  of  conscious  life. 


INDEX 


ABYSSINIA,  Italian  invasion  of,  293 
Acland,  Mr.,  209 
Adams.   John,   135 
Airedale.  285 

America,  appointment  of  non- 
elected  officials  in,  257 

Civil    Service,    271 

science   and    politics   in,   204 

tendency    to    electoral    obn- 

centration    in,   242 

Amos,  96 

Amptliill.   Lord,   302 

Antigone,  95 

Aristotle,  comparison  of  State  to 
a  ship.  286;  criticism  of  Plato's 
communism,  71;  definition  of 
'■polity."  97;  maximum  site  "f 
a  State,  284;  on  action  as  the 
end  of  politics,  186;  on  political 
affection,  53 

Athens,   glaasmakers   of,   134 

Sophocles'   love   of,    210 

Austin.  John,  177 

Bacon.    Francis,    157,    203;    At- 

lantis  of,  196 
Bagehot,  Walter,  158 
Balfour,  Mr.  A.  J.,  50,  127 

Jabez,   258 

Balliol  College,  162 
Ballot,  230  et  seq. 
Barrie.   Mr.  J.   M.,   123 
Bebel,   181 
Beccaria,  39 

Bentham,  Jeremy,  31.  193;  Ma- 
caulay's  attack  on.  46;  on  crimi- 
nology,  39;    on  "natural   right," 


138  et  seq.;  Principles  of  Morals 
and  Legislation,  35 

l>-  ntliamism,  as  a  science  of 
p.. lilies.   139,  196 

Berlin.   Congress  of,   1885,   177 

Bernstein,  115 

Bismarck,  98;  and  artificial  homo- 
geneity of  national  type,  288, 
292;    on    political    egoism,    293 

Bolingbroke,  Lord,  192 

Botha.  General,  295 

Breeding,    selective,    197 

Brighton    Parade.    I  J  1 

British    Empire,   difficulty   of  con- 

ceiving     as     a     political     entity, 

101;     national     homogeneity    in, 

'<  :      political     status     of     non- 

European  races  in.  32 

Bronte,   Charlotte,  285 

Bryan,    Mr.    W.   J.,  262 

Bryce,   Mr.  James,   143  et  seq. 

Buckle,    II.   T.,    153 

Bulow,  Prince,  on  dominance  of 
Prussia,  292:  on  private  and 
national  morality,  303;  on  uni- 
versal  suffrage,   181 

Burke.  Edmund,  SH,  168;  on  man's 
power  of  political  reasoning, 
200:   on  "party,"   104 

Burney,   Fanny,  56 

Burns,   Robert,   123 

Butler,    Bishop,   214 

Canning,   Georce,   243,   289 
Carlyle,    Thomas.    36,    268;    essay 

on    Burns  of.   207 
Cavendish,    Lord    Frederick,    237 


309 


310 


INDEX 


Cavour,   98 

Cecil,    Lord    Robert,   229,   243 

Chadwick,   Sir    K.,    139 

Chamberlain,    Mr.   Joseph,   106 

Charity    Schools,   72 

Chesterton,    Mr.    G.   K.,   82,   126, 

201 
China,  31 
Chinese  Labour,  agitation  against, 

126 
Christianity     and     race     question, 

301 

Harnack     on     expansion     of, 

92 

Churchill,    Lord    Randolph,    193 
Ci\il   Service,  creation  of  English, 
263    et    seq. 

of  India,  218  et  seq. 

importance  of  an  indepen- 
dent, 260  et  seq. 

■ Sir     C.     Trevelyan's     Report 

on,  265  et  seq. 

Comenius,  39 

Competition,  system  of.  in  muni- 
cipal  appointments,  269 

in  railway  appointments.  272 

variety   in   methods   of,   274 

Comte,  Auguste,  90,  217 
Corrupt  Practices  Act,  29,  228 
Corrupt    Practices    Act,    practical 

failure  of,  229 

Corruption,  prevented  by  com- 
petitive  Civil   Service,  271 

Courtney,   Lord,  233   et  seq. 

Crimean   War,   268 

Dante,  308 

Darwin,  Charles,  192,  268;  cor- 
respondence with  Lyell,  206; 
effect  of  his  work,  199;  on  per- 
sistence of  racial  variation,  300 
et  seq.;  Origin  of  Species  of, 
36 

Demosthenes,   224 


Derby,  Lord,  Reform  Act  «>f,  267 

De  Wet.  62 

Diderot,  73 

Disraeli,   Benjamin,   193 

Dolling,  Father,  211 

Educat  on  Act,  1870,  248 

.  222 
Eshex  Committee,  278 

I'    HI  LON,    222 

Kit/p  at  rick.   Sir    Percy,    106 

Fourier,  71 

Fox,   Charles   James,  264 

Cambetta,  213 

Galen,  142 

Gardiner,   Professor  S.  R.,  169 

Garfield,  President,   130 

George  III.  and  American  Revo- 
lution. 137;  and  Fox's  India 
Bill,    264;    popularity    of,    56 

German  Emperor,  280 

Gladstone^  W.  E.,  and  English 
Civil  Service,  267;  and  Queen 
Victoria,  193;  on  change  of 
opinion,  115;  on  Ireland,  167 
et  seq.;  parliamentary  oratory 
of,   182 

Government  Departments,  organi- 
zation of,  275  et  seq. 

Gresham's  Law,   196 

Grote,  George,   139 

Hadley,  A.  T.,  204 
Hague,  The,  307 
Hall,    Professor   Stanley,   40 
Harnack,  T.,  92 
Helvetius,  222 
Herbart,  J.  F.,  39 
Hicks-Beach,   Miss,   101 
Hippocrates,  142 
Hobbes,  Thomas,  39 
Homoiousians,  297 


INDEX 


311 


Homoousians,  297 
Hume,  Joseph,  220 
Huxley,  T.  H.,  205;  Lay  Sermons 

of,  269 
Hyndman,  Mr.,  113 

India,  291 

and  representative  democ- 
racy, 219 

applicability    of    democratic 

principles  in,  32 

appointment    of     East     India 

Company  officials,  264 

Civil  Service,  218 

English  dislike  of  natives  in, 

79 

Individualism,  curve  of,  165 
Inland,   Home  Rule  for,   168 

Jack-on.   Amuiew,  257 

James,  Professor  William,  40,  65 
( note  i  ;  on  sense  of  effective 
reality,  65;  Principles  of  Psy- 
chology  of,   207 

Jameson,    Dr.,    211 

Japan,  304 

Japanese,  mental  environment  of. 
212 

State  Papers,  215 

Jevons,   Professor,    159 
Jury.     See   Trial    by   Jury 
Justice,  conception  of,  u  political 

term,  ''! 
nian     97 

.   I.ou  s.  291 

'  I30CB  Party  and  intellectual 
conditions  of  representative 
government,    250 

Lansdowne.  Lord,  194,  195 

Laurier,  Sir  Wilfrid,  295 

Le  Bon,  G.,  75 

Lingen,  Lord,  266 


Local  Government  Acts  of  1888 
and  1894,  241 

Locke,  John,  and  basis  of  govern- 
ment, 196;  and  pedagogy,  39; 
on  relation  of  man  to  God's  law, 
137 

Lombroso,  C.  39 

London,  Borough  Council  elec- 
tion?, 239 

creation  of  love  for,  210 

lack   of   citizenship   in,    103 

proportion  of  active  regis- 
tered vomers  in.  247 

provision   of   schools   in,    164 

et  seq. 

School     Board    elections    in, 

237 

County      Council      Debating 

Hall,  164 

election      posters, 

125 
Lyell,  Sir  Charles,  206 
Lyndhurst,  Lord,  132 

day,  I  rOrd,  51 ;  and  East 
India  Company.  264;  Essay  in 
Edinburgh  Review  on  Bentham- 

i-ni.    ]<< 

MacO  u  och,  J.  R.,  36 
Macedonia,  291 

Sir  William,  208 
illaise,  106 
M  irshall,    Professor,   160,   166 

Marx    K;irl.  36 

h,    attack    on    cos- 
mopolitanism.     289:      on      geo- 
graphical   division   of   humanity, 
I  et  seq. 
Mendel,  Abbot.  214 
Merivale,    Mr.    Herman,    145 
Mettemich,  98 
Mill,  James,  219    (note) 

J.    S..    139;    on    mankind    in 

the    average,    144,    176;    opposi- 


312 


INDEX 


tion    to    the    Ballot    of,    230    et 

seq. 
Milner.  Lord,  294,  295 
Molesworth,   Sir   W.,   139 
More,    Sir    Thomas,    Republic    of, 

196 
Morgan,  Professor  Lloyd,  40 
Morley,    Lord,    223;     on    W.     E. 

Gladstone,   167   et  seq. 
Morris,  William.  90,  113,  285 
Municipal      Representation      Bill, 

239 

Napoleon  I.  and  psychology  of 
war.  194,  213 

Louis,  58 

Negro  Suffrage  in  United  States, 
31 

Nevinson,  Mr.  H.  W.,  219 

Newman.  J.  H.,  268;  on  personi- 
fication. 91 

Nicholas   II.,   144 

North.  Lord.  264 

Northcote,   Sir   Stafford,   265 

Olivier,  Sir  Sydney,  299  (note) 
Ostrogorski,  Professor,  143  et  seq. 
Owen,   Robert,   71 

Paine,  Thomas,  243 
Pal,  Mr.  Chandra,  195 
Palmerston,  Lord,   57 
Pankhurst,   Mrs.,   195    (note) 
Parnell,   C.   S.,   194 
Parramatta  Tea,   108  et  seq. 
Party  as  a  political  entity.  103 
Patroclus,  85 

Pearson,   Professor   Karl,   150 
Peel,  Sir  Robert,  111 
Pericles,  94 
Persia.  31 
Philadelphia,  242 
Philippines,  31 
Place,   Francis,   139 


Plato,  96;  "cave  of  illusion"  of. 
133;  his  "harmony  of  the  Soul" 
in  modern  political  life,  205, 
212;  on  basis  of  government,  35; 
on  government  by  consent,  217; 
on  idea  of  perfect  man,  136;  on 
the  public,  190;  religion  in  the 
Republic  of,  221;  Republic  of, 
196 

Playfair  Commission,  274 

Poor  Law  Commission  of  1834, 
173  et  seq. 

of    1905,    174    et 

seq. 

Proportional  Representation  and 
Lord   Courtney,  234  et  seq. 

Society,    236 

Prospero,   120 

Putney,  125 

Race  Problem  and  representa- 
tive  democracy,   30 

in  international  politics, 

78,  290  et  seq. 

in   India,    79 

Reform  Act  of  1867,  227,  267 

Religion  of  Comte.  90 

in  Plato's  Republic,  221 

Representative  democracy  and 
India,  219 

and   race   problem,   30 

in    Egypt,    222 

in    England,    26 

in    United    States,    26 

Rome,  98 

Roosevelt,    Theodore,    38 

Rousseau,  J.  J.,  and  pedagogy, 
39;   on   human  rights,   137 

Rural    Parish    Councils,   242 

Ruskin,  John,  13,  285 

Samuel,  Mr.  Herbert,  243 

Schnadhorst,  Mr.,  268 

Science,  as  an  entity,  203  et  seq. 


INDEX 


313 


Seeley,   J.   R.,   Expansion  of  Eng- 
land of,  294 
Senior,  Nassau,  36 

Political    Economy    of,    35 

Shelley,   171 

Socialism,     conception     of     as     a 
working  creed,  112 

curve  of,   165 

Socrates,  94,  209 
Somerset  House,  261 
Sophocles,  210 
Spencer,   Herbert,  37 
Stein.  H.  F.,  98 
Stephen,  Sir  James,  267 
Suffrage,  for  women  at  1906  elec- 
tion,  29 

negro,  31 

universal,  Prince  Billow's  at- 
tack on,   181   et  seq. 

Swift,   Dean,   192 
Swinburne,  A.  C,  291 

TxMMAm    Hall,   128 
Tarde,   G..   75 
Tennyson,  Lord,  89 
Thackeray,  71 
Togo,  Admiral,  80 
Trevelyan,  Sir  Charles.  265  et  seq. 
Trial     by    Jury,    development    of, 
224  et  seq. 


Tweefontein,  62 
Tyrrell,   Father,   114 

United  Kincdom,  proportion  of 
elected  to  electors  in,  257 

I  nited  States  and  Negro  Suffrage, 
31 

and  representative  de- 
mocracy,  26 

Vaux,  Madame  de,  91 
\  ereeniging,  Peace  of,  294 
Victoria,     Queen,     193;     on     com- 
petition  for   Indian   Army   com- 
missions.   267;    portrait    of,    on 
coins,  55 
Virgin   of  Kevlaar,  93 

War    Office    Council,    277 

Wells,  .Mr.  H.  G.,  on  delocalized 
population,  286;  on  representa- 
tive democracy,  217;  on  "sense 
of  the  State,"  210;  on  unique- 
ness  of   the    individual,    148 

Whately,   Archbishop.   36 

Women's  Suffrage  at  1906  elec- 
tion,  30 

methods    of    suffragists, 

195 

Wood.    Mr.    M'Kinnon.    106 

Wordsworth,  Prelude  of,   172,  207 


A 


51 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 

This  book  b  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


inn"""-1  ^\      3   1158   00002   21 

AA    000  814  109    5 


